Well for starters, the reason you don't see much chat could be your area.. Now what I've notice is there isn't much normal gossip kinda chat at all, but that has a lot to do I think with launch and how BAD the gil spammers were, people were turning off their /yell and /shout channels because they couldn't see anything BUT gil spam.

2nd, a lot of people just chat in their respective free companies and linkshells, so you may want to try and join one, but again that would be best to look at your server forums. While you may not be able to post, you can always look, see the free companies and go to their webpages that most link and sign-up with one of them that sounds interesting and see where that takes you.