I personally use Matrix.org so I can just set up a chat room and itll be hosted there. Of course if you want to self host a matrix instance for you and your friends thats an option, or some of your friends can use the self hosted instance and some other instances (Matrix is a federated protocol).
Maybe it's the interests I have, but those chat rooms may have people but not a lot of activity. Also, the specific people I want to chat with don't use Matrix.
The big issue they've had, imo, is that there's too many bots and too many IRC bridges from stubborn oldies who refused to migrate away from IRC.
There was a time when freenode went down that many channels were experiencing an exodus, which would have been the perfect time for Matrix adoption, but people were far too stubborn with IRC despite its many flaws (privacy, lack of history, poor feature set, etc.)