Internet Relay Chat (Shorthand IRC) is Still Growing
"There are 492 known IRC networks listed below," says this "networks" (index of known networks) page of netsplit.de (it used to be around 460-470), and the netsplit.de front page shows an average of about 300k people online across known network (it was stuck at around 270k for a long time), so unless 30k new bots came to infest all those networks, the gain might be real people who have genuine interest in IRC. As noted earlier this year, bots are actually being banned en masse.
Contrariwise, social control media is waning; people might be recognising just how time-wasting it is, with clunky interfaces, huge lag/overhead, and cumbersome maintenance tasks. I say this based on personal experience (13 years in various social control media sites).
To many people, IRC is like "simple Discord" or "simple Slack" (no bloat, but similar functionality) and we are told that contrary to Matrix, Quibble will have real benefits while maintaining simplicity. We'll be covering Quibble some more in the near future. See our past coverage about Quibble (Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV). █
