Comment by SamWhited

I'm not really a fan of IRC (a federated network where some OSS projects were on their own servers or different ones would have limited the blast radius of a hostile takeover of one server like this), but Matrix is bloated and slow and the protocol makes no sense for chat (though it may have other applications); it's not a great fit for a large network with lots of people who may or may not have modern hardware. Not to mention that the servers would take a lot more resources to run on Matrix (assuming it eventually gets roughly the same size as Freenode was).