Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.