Freenode is still plenty active, specially for FOSS. Even Reddit opened just a couple years ago their own server @ irc.snoonet.org. Coding chatbots for IRC is

Freenode is still plenty active, specially for FOSS. Even Reddit opened just a couple years ago their own server @ irc.snoonet.org. Coding chatbots for IRC is still a really fun way to practice NLP concepts.