If you and your friends chip, it’ll be a few bucks a pop per month to have your own private server with voice chat rooms and video chat rooms.
It’s all opensource and contributes to the ecosystem. Best of all, no age verification because the data is yours.
I’m also still in some IRC channels from way back, and I can’t deny I hate what discord did to the IRC community. (“Look how they massacred my boy…”)
Of course, Discord pulled it off for a good reason - the experience was seamless, featureful, rich, and modern - none of which IRC can claim. And it’s only cantankerous sticks in the mud such as I who care about ideological concerns like interoperability and open standards.
And another thing that Discord did is to absolutely explode the channel count. In the IRC days, a particular community or friend group would make do with one single channel. But that group moves to Discord, and suddenly creates a general channel, announcements channel, music channel, games channel, cooking channel - all for one single friend group, and multiply that by the number of groups you are in - because the Discord model permitted it and made it frictionless.
And I think that’s why for some people who use Discord at the moment, it wouldn’t be enough to simply have a channel on a public Matrix instance. People are used to having a whole ‘server’ to themselves (of course discord ‘servers’ aren’t servers, but let’s set that aside) and so they’d need at least a ‘space’ in Matrix, being the more reasonably named analogue.