Not just you. Age-wise I suppose I'm part of the ᶜʳⁱⁿᵍᵉ ‘New Guard’ ᶜʳⁱⁿᵍᵉ, but I consider email + IRC to still be really hard to beat in terms of low barrier to entry.
I think this might be special case of more general and more important topic of software project (or basically any human operated project) spanning multiple generations. Knowledge transfer, continuity of ideas, experience sharing ... all that difficult stuff.
The Rust community, comprised largely of "New Guarders", is very active on IRC. It seems to me as though this community split is really an issue of a (relative) lack of developer community-building and marketing.