@NEETzsche
They're not looking to chat, they're tourists. Start thinking of normies as tourists. They visit a place, bring their culture with them, expect to be pampered, spend zero energy on discovering this new place they find themselves in and pollute everything around them with shit and plastics.

Then they go back home and complain about the people in the country they visited, only to come back again, to be able to tell themselves they had the ability to "go on holiday" and "break the routine" and feel like their lives are not totally, completely and utterly a boring routine they endure while they wait to "go on holiday".

These people want something that is 90% similar to what they already know and 10% different. They want something that they can tell people back home they did and get social credit. There is no social credit in going on IRC and chatting. Instagram has the photos, facebook has the likes, fedi currently has the hype.

The sad truth is, nobody wants to really chat, they want validation. IRC was good enough until super-validation came in the form of facebook et al.

I was on IRC back in the 90s, too. That was a shithole as well. At least it did its job well, and still does. It just solves a use-case that normies nowadays don't really want, if they're honest with themselves.