Counter-example experience: At some point I tried to find an active community to discuss Electrical Engineering. I sampled 8-9 Discords, and they were all dead and all had redundant #general and #offtopic channels.

##electronics on Libera otoh is highly active.

Discord sucks because it's way too fragmented and diluted.

Discord is fragmented and diluted because it's the only way to survive (other than by being small enough to be irrelevant, as IRC does). Using any social system that isn't fragmented and diluted for anything other than bland pleasantries carries too much risk of becoming today's "twitter main character".

"I don't use X, therefore X is dead" is a very common trope.

Libera currently has 34.5k users connected. And hi, I'd be someone under 30 that uses IRC quite often.

People over 30 have similar thoughts about TikTok.

found the teenager

> literally nobody under 30 is on it.

Maybe once we're all dead, it will.

Until then, that's part of its appeal. It's not that it's mostly older people, it's that it's mostly people with a great deal of experience.

haha yeah you may be right but it's not like you'll ever find those good servers