While I've got a broad interest in the subject (interested in hearing whatever you'd like to share), I am especially interested in hearing from people who prefer Usenet/IRC to newer, web-based social platforms (Discord, Slack, etc). Especially if you have taken a strong stance either way.
- What keeps you off the web and in non-web spaces? - What specifically about Use/IRC do you like?
Gopher: Curated blog, sites, services and even news aggregators. No bloat, no JS, no waste. No ads. No clickbaits. Pure raw text.
gopher://magical.fish, gopher://1436.ninja and gopher://sdf.org as my main source/portalish gopher holes.
IRC: tech channels, sometimes news. Libera.chat it's my main network. No bloat, too, you don't need an i3/Core2Duo to talk to someone.
Usenet: techgroups, delayed help available. No need to be online 24/7. You can pull posts once a week and everything will be fine.
If you are a geek/nerd, you can code your own client on most programming languages in just two weeks. With something like TCL, Perl, Python or Ruby, a single week would be fine.
The opposite is different. An IRC server requires maintenance, and INN can be crazy difficult for Usenet, but for Gopher it's dumb simple to set up both content and a server. And, yet, there are pubnixes and tildes oferring this even from SSH, for internal and federated use against other pubnixes. And it's amazing.