Then you can stay on forums that needs to be refreshed, or uuuh.. isn't there a proprietary IRC like thing for young people, something like Disco? Or Discom. Or Discord? Apparently it's much like IRC but without the freedom.
I think that's always been the allure of IRC in modern internet times... Keeps the normal people away and makes it a place that's more exclusive to nerds. It's scary, you have to learn a few things, has it's own etiquette and you can't just use it from any phone.
I think XMPP would be the most appropriate tech for us to adopt, since it's easily self-hostable, has great mobile apps, is federated, and doesn't require an always connected bot to record chat history to know what was said while you were away. It's functionally an improved IRC.