In Finland there used to be a culture of everyone from high school upwards living in chatrooms or IRC, so it has been extremely natural for people to "idle" on

In Finland there used to be a culture of everyone from high school upwards living in chatrooms or IRC, so it has been extremely natural for people to "idle" on chat channels and interact naturally over those. I would say chat channels feel much more intimate and social environment to me than sitting in an office. Even when we worked in offices we had IRC or Slack or other channels open and interacted over those rather than by actually walking around and talking. It's simply much more effective, asynchronous, and leaves a log of what was said and agreed.