At the moment, it is me and a handful of other tech friends who are setting up servers of their own.

We've been installing things manually to test out different parts, but I think I'll be switching to a docker setup this weekend (purely for ease of setup)

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

There are all sorts of bridges and bots:

https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bots/

Once I have it roughly figured out, I'll look at paying to get some redundancy sorted, and then stick to this as my communications going forward.