A similar (although not at all Silk Road affiliated) tor based IRC server is in place that a handful of users go to for your everyday chat that a member of the old community setup. I dropped by a couple of times before to see what it was like. Look at: http://silkroad5v7dywlc.onion/index.php?topic=15505.0 if you want to get an idea of how IRC works over Tor.