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.