@kaliwolf Hmm, well, there are some furry communities on Matrix already, pawb.social and bark.lgbt have their own instances for example.
From what I've heard they do have some members creating small-medium communities.
But overall Matrix is still fairly rough around the edges in some cases, and I seriously doubt that majority of fluffs using Telegram would be willing to switch, they got too comfy over there 
There are also some considerations you should take into account, like that other homeservers supposedly ping your domain long after you bury it (heard of that from somewhere, unsure how true that is).
@kaliwolf Oh, that's awesome exercise for that! Bonus points if you setup voice with Element Call with that setup and setup stickers for Element clients hehe :>
I've been hosting my own Matrix instance since 2018 and I'm pretty darn happy with it, despite how difficult it is to convince others to use it instead of their comfy platform of choice (doesn't help that I have reservations about the ecosystem itself that make it difficult for me to recommend Matrix as daily driver for most non technical users). But I've learned plenty while doing it and hosting it on my low-end server machine is satisfying as heck.
Chat is one of the major elements in my online life so having peace of mind by hosting it by myself, not relying on anyone else's hardware and learning how it works so I feel better about using it is a freeing experience that is difficult to find with most of other solutions.
Kali Wolf
Frisk