hruodr that seems to be true.
blackbird9 I also used bitchx and xchat--would I have been using them on Windows? It seems to me I did.
I remember, I'm going to say early 2000's when we all sorta hung out on irc. There were people in #freebsd--I forget the server, this was before libera though, where the chats would about all sorts of things, e.g., what form of exercise should someone do, meanwhile, the guy who first wrote psearch (I think that was the port) was on there, saying, Hey, anyone wanna try this, and so on. It was always active. Then when he came back and told us it was accepted as an official port, we all felt glad the way you would for any friend's success.
That was back when bash.org was pretty popular. (for those who don't know it, it was a collection of funny irc conversations.)
Most of the time the insults were friendly, again the way it is among friends. For example, someone would praise emacs and someone else would say, Yeah a nice operating system. If only it had a text editor.
But again, the nature of it was as it would be among friends, for the most part. One would go there to hang out when bored.
But now, it can go for hours without anyone saying anything, and @kpederson I think last time I looked, there were well over 300 people there--I want to say at least ~500, but that could be faulty memory. But..it's quiet. Even if someone has a question, answers often take a long time to come back.