This has gone on since a few weeks : part of the lobbies just don’t show up in the unranked lobbies. It has proven to be incredibly frustrating to try and set up lobbies to play with friends or other random players, only to either wait for ages and noone comes, or for your friend to say that your lobby doesn’t show up.
What’s more is that all lobbies are picked up by aoe2.net, and you can join them from there. At the time of making this post, there were about 200 lobbies up (with only 16-17 visible in game), and half of those were filled with only one player (the host).
But not only that, but the few lobbies that do show up for some mysterious reason are filled near-instantly because a ton of players do want to play and are waiting for the few lobbies that show up to jump inside them.
So you’re either stuck to hoping the game mode you want to play shows up and hope for a spot, or play with your friends, who aren’t always connected/numerous enough for full lobby games.