I feel the same way. Not to say this is a bad idea, chat / IRC / etc. are all massively successful and when I was younger I loved hanging out on chat.
The problem for me is chat is synchronous. You have to sit there staring at it to participate in conversations. As a result, since I now have kids/job/etc. I basically can't participate in communities which are primarily chat based (like Discord, IRC, and so on).
The only communities I still participate in actively are those on reddit, precisely because I can engage at my leisure rather than having to respond in near real time. I feel it's the closest we have to mailing lists and forums of old.