We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them.

My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience.

I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.