Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still around and that's one of the few places on the Internet where I still see tightly knit communities with old Internet buddies from the early 2000s. I am quite happy that IRC is less popular than the world wide web. As a consequence of it being less popular, it has not become riddled with ads, political influence, and addictive content popping up every few minutes, like the web has become. Some IRC channels can be unusually quiet with nothing more than phatic expressions exchanged occasionally for days before any engaging conversation comes up. Yet these channels maintain a tight sense of community.

Among some of the active channels I have found due to my interests, I find the Freenode ##python and ##math to be very good quality channels. There is a #not-math channel which is good fun. Then there is #not-not-math too. I have been an operator of the ##algorithms channel for over 10 years now, and although I participate rarely in this channel these days, the channel continues to have good quality discussions by other operators and members of the channel. By the way, my nick is "spal" on Freenode.

These days, there are web gateways to IRC, that make it easy to connect to IRC networks without having to install a new client. For example, there is https://webchat.freenode.net/ which is a bland but decent interface to connect to the Freenode IRC network. Note that the "unaffiliated" cloaks are not honoured while connecting via the web gateway. Using a proper IRC client like WeeChat or HexChat provides a better experience than the web gateway. Pidgin supports IRC too.