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.)

I assume having your own chat room with your friends would mean self hosting?

Why would you assume this? There’s plenty of servers available and conversations can still be encrypted.

Voice chat is extremely lacking, though.

It’s very strange that you’ve made a post about bugs but chose not to list any of the bugs.

Like, how can we make a recommendation if we don’t know what types of issues you’re running into? What type of hardware you have? What expectations you have?

It just kind of screams of disgruntled user syndrome. These are community lead projects so, yes, they’ll have bugs. But if people never say what they are or what issues they had with what they used, the best the rest of us can do is just guess!