I happen to use #Jabber/#XMPP for both use cases.
It all started for me ≈ 2014 with a third use case: The "small town": We needed a chat for my development team, so we "sudo apt install prosody" and later let join the whole company (30..40 people).
You can find larger group chats here:
https://search.jabber.network/ (thanks, @sjn)
But I'm also in IRC channels via the #biboumi gateway and in Matrix rooms via #slige by @nicoco.