The Fall of Freenode Didn't Kill IRC and the Web's Issues (Not Limited to LLM Slop) Didn't Kill Everything
It feels like the slop bubble is steadily bursting already.
A few months from now the fall of Freenode (or birth of libera.chat, which was created to replace it and become a censorship/filter tool against political speech) turns 5. It was recently noted that IRC was subjected to elaborate vandalism. They tried to target us as well; but we stopped them before they could even begin. So we're doing fine. Our communication network is safe and amicable.
For the fifth day in a row we've served over a million requests (per day) and Gemini traffic also rose lately. Geminispace is, in general, also growing and is easily accessible. It's always growing and this coming summer Gemini Protocol will turn 7. IRC is also being adopted by some more projects (many networks exist). It's seen as a commodity tool for setting up online chats; it just generally worked and it has had almost 4 decades to mature.
Simple things last longer because they are easier to maintain.
The "old Web" (not 'Webapps', typically JavaScript with a Web address but without actual pages) isn't dying, not entirely anyway. The other day we pointed out that ibiblio.org has gone offline; well, it's back online now along with old pages of Groklaw (though some links there go to the domain that is now hijacked by squatters*).
As long as there are enough people willing to keep the simple (or "old") stuff it'll refuse to die. █
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* Much worse than just going offline. After the fire incident PCLinuxOS is back online, but it has hardly been updated and it requires javaScript to access.