fwiw, XMPP/Slack/Discord/etc basically solve the same problem that IRC already solved. Software Engineers just reinvent the wheel again and again as everyone loves a green field.

That said, Meta cannot be trusted. They’re going to do a year or two of embrace and extend, pretending to be good citizens. Then they will invent some crisis that causes them to want to de-federate, likely that content on other servers is not moderated to their standards or that convoluted features of their extended protocol are not being met. This take seems pretty spot on to me.