When you are new in an organisation, it is very common to feel awkward in making smalltalk and being remote would make it even more so. What technology are you conducting your conversations with? With Zoom you can read body language, etc. Using messaging alone provides far less clues.
I presume that you have been assigned a mentor and some tasks to perform. In which case, I would expect that your conversations pertain to the work you are doing and not shooting the breeze by the water cooler. Perhaps a good starting step would be to talk about aspects of the tasks at hand and then expand from there, asking about the decisions that led to the design / architecture / tool choices and from there the roles and personalities involved.