If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
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I'll second IRC. I don't need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it's worth to me.
Forums, too, though I'm a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.
Instant Messenger was the shit back in the day.
uMatrix browser extension. It has been marked archived by Gorhill, last release is two years old, you are supposed to just use uBlock [Origin]. However, it still (luckily) works fine and is exactly what I want. (Sure, I won't install this for my parents.) The GUI to simply choose what you want the site to be allowed to do is perfect.
I still get most of my news via RSS. Lemmy is my sole social media usage. I use Matrix every day but see it as very different to IRC for some uses. Forums are useful but much of the tech content you find via search engines is out of date. Also not all forums are created equally. The new KDE forums have a major shortcoming compared to the old version.
KDE 3 over everything else.
I love modern KDE, and use many different desktop environments regularly, but nothing will ever come close to the feeling I had the first time I got to experience KDE. And I really don't think anyone has been able to approach the configurability KDE 3 had
I see you, but man, I am of the exact opposite opinion. Configurability is, for me, a bug that needs to be fixed when it comes to desktop environments. It should be as standard as possible across machines.