Maybe you should consider incorporating it as a nonprofit and potentially a technology switch to Matrix? It would be nice to have a homeserver that people can rely on and isn't Matrix.org.
Please don't. I like Matrix, I use it, but it's not IRC, and it's far, far more resource heavy (both in homeserver and in clients) than IRC is. You can run IRC on ancient gutless wonders, and it uses almost no resources. Matrix, especially the flagship Element client, is a resource hog. Start throwing rooms with thousands of users in, and it requires an awful lot of resources.
Keep IRC IRC.
I'm not a huge fan of Matrix's current design or implementation, but I use it and I can understand why others do.
Matrix has problems, but as the ecosystem grows we'll start to see improvements.
Synapse is fine until someone on the homeserver starts joining a bunch of rooms, then you'd better have a lot of RAM for it.
And Element, while a perfectly good client, is the standard "bloated electron app" option that chews 700MB of RAM and lags, entering text, on a Raspberry Pi 4.
There are alternatives, but they tend to have weird issues, at least last time I messed with them, in how they handle some of the corner cases of encryption.
Synapse is simply awful as a server implementation, and the clients are just simply bloated.
But if you are looking for a good federated, self hosted, and encrypted chat solution, for my own private chat system; I've gone back to XMPP - I've settled on:
* ejabberd (which is in Erlang so just by definition is going to perform leagues better than Python) - prosody also works fine (especially for "lower end" servers) - though both need a bit of configuration at first install
* conversations.im on my Android phone
* dino.im on my desktop (which recently added calling capabilities back to phones: https://fosstodon.org/@dino/106228549009869402 )
* (if you're on a Windows desktop): gajim.org is still making releases and works (including E2EE)
I do not know of a good iOS client for XMPP right now, but these three fully support OMEMO for E2EE and I've had no issues talking to others on them.
It's ok but it's really aiming at the whatsapp/telegram crowd. Open a few hundred channels and it's overwhelmed, especially visually. You can set the channels to a higher-density view but not the channel list itself. You're scrolling forever.
Unfortunately Matrix is very tightly coupled with Element, it's the only client that really implements everything.
I'd love something like Quassel (which is what I use for IRC now) for Matrix. Native app, excellent performance and features.
The bigger question is if they retain enough server sponsors, who may be paying more attention. They might defect to libera.chat or OFTC, or just decide the whole business is not worth their while.
With IRC freenode has a control structure that can enforce their rules/guidelines, this breaks with matrix.
* If matrix.org went away tomorrow, is there enough capacity in the rest of matrix for users to migrate to.
* Federation only exists when a channel has users from multiple homeservers on it - how many small/medium channels only exist on matrix.org?
* People's identities are tied to their home server. You would be userfoo:matrix.org - if matrix.org went away, how would you find all your contacts again?
Points 1 and 2 would be addressed by more capacity and more independent homeservers, point 3 would require some sort of multi-homing.
2. Almost all public rooms seem to have users from other servers.
3. Account portability/multihoming is in the works at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2787