Hosted a ejabberd for years. So yeah it and irc where the primary was to chat with friends.

But transports where so and so fun to host. So for a time I connected with bitlbee to jabber and some other protocols.

But grew tired of both keeping a irc bouncer, bitlbee and the jabber stuff running. And a disk crash while I was a cash strapped student was the final drop.

So went irc/email only for a while.

But now years later I'm running a matrix server with several bridges. And that's far easier especially since it's not lxc based hosting I setup but docker.