Interesting.
This means that they just want what every human wants, a group to belong to, where they can pat eachother on the back and talk about things they mostly agree about.
All mediums are perfect for that, IRC included. They just need someone to point them in the right direction. Tech has been taken over by big corps with an obvious benefit to keeping them uneducated and they use their grip on the masses to steer them to their next thing. Like meta working on a federated experiment, I read somewhere.

It's the clear fault of the tech sector that has allowed this crap to take place, lured by the money of the dotcom boom and silicon valley. We (I'm a techie, too) should have been advising people to get off these death platforms but we didn't. I, personally, as an IRC veteran kept telling people to get off facebook and make a website. To stop using whatsapp and instagram cause they're addiction personified. You may start to talk to family on FB but soon you're posting for likes. You may start to share your family photos with family on instagram but soon you're killing yourself over the imaginarily perfect life of your neighbor.

We let this shit happen and now that these tech giants are laying off people like there's no tomorrow for them (which is pretty close to true) we should all be feeling rather embarassed.