I also tried to "get back" on IRC a couple of times but even on Libera pretty much everyone is idling and nobody seems to actually use it aside from having a cl

I also tried to "get back" on IRC a couple of times but even on Libera pretty much everyone is idling and nobody seems to actually use it aside from having a client sit there "just in case". In practice Discord seems to be where everyone is nowadays and while Discord is little more than a proprietary IRC with built-in history and images, people are active there. It basically feels the same as when i used mIRC back in the 90s and early 2000s - including the part where some channels/servers were so full of people i could barely keep up. If anything it is more than i ever saw on IRC as i am in 25 "servers"[0] with various channels in each (though like with IRC i only participate in a handful of them and i only occasionally browse the rest). Fortunately Discord works via the web and i have the web interface pinned on Firefox all the time so i don't have to use their client. [0] i really dislike the name as they aren't really servers, just groups of channels - everything is on Discord's proprietary server