After having the same experience negative some time before Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try.

I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now. Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't even try to enable encryption this time :(

It both still has problems and has been improving for all of its existence. It's been working for my usecases for years