How much effort took that process and how many people are using it?

I would like to do the same, but with the possibility of scaling it up a bit.

I did the same except federated and it's pretty easy if you have some experience with Ansible and Docker. This repo has a great Ansible playbook that will set up the whole thing for you on whatever VM or VPS you point it at:

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

I mean, I was still learning how Matrix works, so it took some trial and error - especially voice/video calls - so a few days of reading docs and doing.

Later, though, I stood up my own Matrix server, this time federated, and that only took maybe an hour or two. :)

I did not use the community Ansible playbook that someone else in this thread suggested, because I enjoyed instead figuring out how the individual pieces work together, but I tried it much later, and it seems to work very nicely, so I too can recommend it.

Meamwhile the Wikimedia foundation are still stuck on a fragmented mishmash of IRC for the old guard, and Discord or Telegram for the younger crowd who quite literally would rather not engage then forgo GIFs.

You'd think they could dig into their hundreds of millions of donated dollars they don't even need and help Matrix and themselves but apparently not.

In their defence WMF have been an Element customer for years, for internal usage. But rolling out Matrix across a large community requires significant community management effort (e.g. what Mozilla did with https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-moz...), and that's probably the gap you're alluding to here.

To be fair they never did make any effort to provide community chat spaces. Maybe they think it will legitimise not using wiki talk pages to post memes and go off topic, but 20 years of evidence says people will find their own places to hang out. Time was, everyone kind of just happily used Frenode IRC by default (after all, what else was there? MSN?). Now it's all sorts of apps all over the place, mostly set by whoever got fed up with whichever IRC channel first starting their own channel with blackjack and hookers...uh...image attachments and emojis...in their current favourite app. The Freenode/Libera debacle dented what was left, and now it's a pretty sad closed, Balkanized state of things.

I still think they'd get more value out of slinging you guys a small-to-them wodge of cash to run a community homeserver than most other things they spend money on.