alt Hacker Newsirc has a very low return on investment. crazy amount of tinkering for what is ascii characters vaguely thrown in your direction. it clearly has cultural staying power (and it does act as a strong filter for technically-minded people), but a oneliner chatroom in your terminal is a fun option for both newbies who get easily intimidated, and pros who dont have much free time anymore.
IRC with Ergo + Soju is pretty easy and pleasant. Barely spent 20 minutes setting up a server, bridge, and bouncer. Has been really helpful where bandwidth was an issue (I am writing as I stay in a city with only 500kbps internet where Discord and other heavy webapps straight up refuse to load)