I keep a client running out of habit. All my regular hangs are pretty dead. People left their clients running out of habit. One line per month is a busy month.

A small group of friends have moved to a self-hosted matrix server. That’s more active.

I think there’s just a paradigm change. IRC used to be pretty synchronous. You’d chat while you were connected, and not really multitask and zone out to do other stuff.

Today people expect messaging to be asynchronous. You get your push notifications and deal with it when you have the time.