I care about privacy and flexibility and the other things decentralization gets you, but I grew up with instant messengers (Yahoo, WLM, now Discord, which is the closest thing to WLM in feature completeness yet still not at parity since it's a thin client where every feature rent seeks). Not only could I barely figure out how to use IRC last time I tried, but it doesn't have things I've come to expect, like avatars, emoticons, file transfer with embedded previews, etc. D: That shit's in the Stone Age!

I'm excited by projects like Element, which is Matrix protocol-powered Discord but open source, but, aside from network performance and feature parity, network effects rule social tech. You're doomed to use Discord if nobody uses Element.