Aye...but you're remembering PC gaming as it
used to be, not as it is now...the social aspect isn't that far removed from gaming on an Xbox...minus the sofa and fighting with the wife/kids for control of the TV remote
A few of us that switched to PC from Xbox at the time same used Xbox live chat until our subs ran out...mostly found it was a memory hog along with all the other Xbox live functions we still have access to through Win 10. Most of the PC crowd use a headset/mic for gaming these days, same as Xbox folks...since we all like the same social aspect of playing games as we're shooting each other in the face or T-bagging n00bs in Battlefield.
With Discord, we can all chat and send messages in game no matter which platform we're on....is that maybe the avalanche yer on about? If so...it's already happened whilst you were away.
We all stopped using the Xbox live function in the main because the Xbox DVR vid application and Xbox live functions hogged over 500 meg of system memory on it's own, killed the hard drive which caused serious lag in games due to jerko-vision... a common enough issue on the Xbox with games having decent FPS but still having micro pauses due to excessive hard drive access by Xbox DVR even when idle. The difference is we can see how hoggy it is with system resources even when idle on PC by simply looking at the Windows task manager. It's a system killer, even on high end gaming rigs like mine...
The other reason we stopped using the Xbox live functions is that there were better universal options...like Discord.
We tried Team speak but found it over complicated and quite cliquey, tried Steam Chat too which was better but was only of any use if everyone in the game had a Steam account...there are a few players on PC that wouldn't touch Steam of course...the same ones that insist on faffing about with Linux strangely enough, but they're usually single player aficionados in the first place with no room for social gaming.
We all settled on Discord since it's free, works flawlessly with cracking voice comms and has a neat app complete with game launcher much the same as the Steam app that runs in the background instead of the web browser based thing. We tend to use it like Xbox live chat with added functionality and benefits...post pics and web links, send messages, phone service rather than BT or mobile... we can also voice chat live with our Xbox mates which breaks down platform barriers. Like on Xbox, game sound and chat comes direct through the headset with adjustable volume bias to taste.
Since most of the mates I played games with for years on Xbox now have PC's...and we are mates in real life as well as opposed to just anonymous internet avatars who play the same games... we universally despise Facebook, it's cheaper than a call and we don't have to faff about with phones when we're playing games. Saying that, even when the PC isn't on, we're all still connected via the Discord app on phone.
Even What's App, which we all used on the phones...it's got a PC app too [yesnod]