There’s plenty of stuff that isn’t tech there but I don’t use it much for general browsing and chat. We host rooms on SXC for some of our communities and the instance itself as a means of communication off Lemmy. Most of my time is spent in those rooms interacting with people I’ve met on Lemmy or random people who find our rooms on SXC lol.

It does but not all of them are out in the open to discover. Part of how SXC works is based around not being discoverable if you don’t want to be.

There is an official directory with quite a few rooms and some unofficial ones for things that aren’t allowed on the main directory for whatever reason. I would say the overall size is much smaller than even Matrix but there are some pretty large and active rooms that cover a fair bit of tech and general topics. It’s not perfect but I prefer it to Matrix.

We use SimpleX chat. It isn’t as popular as Matrix but the security is better and we run into fewer traffickers there than on Matrix.