1 to many and 1 to all is another matter entirely.
They have never been free no matter what the protocol or medium was used. If free, it has always been during market capture phase after which ppl pay one way or another.
So your choices are either pay for the pipes or get it subsidized via personal data for ads.
I think it is much cheaper to run a few thousand irc servers than running discord, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp etc. How many active irc users do we have? 200k? 2mil? I don't know. But every other provider has users in the multiple millions or billions. This is not another League, this is an entirely other game.
I really want to have my old Internet back, were everything was provided for free by volunteers. But this is not the world where discord operates, discord and FAANG are dealing with the eternal September of the last two decades.
IRC is still there, you can still use it if you dislike Discord. No-one is forcing you.
Reality is that IRC has so many issues (netsplit in 2025 LOL, retaining messages, lack of rich media, fragmented extensions to name a few) which is why it's not being used.
1 to many and 1 to all is another matter entirely.
They have never been free no matter what the protocol or medium was used. If free, it has always been during market capture phase after which ppl pay one way or another.
So your choices are either pay for the pipes or get it subsidized via personal data for ads.