IRC is pretty good, and it survived the Freenode takeover by simply letting everyone know things are moving over to Libera.
Bluesky is awesome if you just ignore the "Discover" tab, I wish they'd just get rid of it. Librem One did something similar with Mastodon, it was peaceful.
After the initial excitement of finding decentralized platforms like that, I personally realized I don't care much for that type of interaction with people, so I don't use any of them very often. Same way I don't use my phone much, but it's there when I want it. Like a utility should be.
Mind you, we are talking about using these protocols for the general public, not savvy hacker news readers.
