IRC is a Lot Better Than Social Control Media (They're Not the Same at All)
Some years ago someone said in IRC (where he was a hostile tenant) that IRC is just a form of social control media despite predating it by nearly 2 decades.
IRC is not like social control media because of how it is built, nor is it like "fediverse" (decentralised) social control media because of how it works, in practice.
It has now been almost exactly 4 years since I deleted my last remaining presence in social control media (maybe deleted is too strong a term, I merely abandoned everything there). It was probably a mistake to engage there any further after 2020 or earlier for the same reasons noted yesterday in relation to Reddit.
A good social analogy for IRC is, there are many buildings with a party in each building. With large IRC networks like Freenode there are many rooms in the same building ("channels") and each one has a party. With social control media, however, there's one giant building and no rooms; it's a shouting match between incompatible, hostile groups. Nothing will get done, people will harm each other, and the masters (like MElon) like it.
Having moved to our own IRC network (that we formed in May 2021, soon it'll be "half a decade ago"), we now have our own building with our own rooms. So the abuse has mostly subsided. █