Been there, done that... It is a waste of time and effort if you can't convince other people to join your services. I have operated a jabber server for quite some time (2008ish - 2012). Mostly for me and some friends to organize lan parties and such. I told other people about it but after a week of interest, no one seriously used it, since everyone was already using other services to communicate -- also using a XMPP client seemed to be to much to ask for the non-techies.

As time goes on our communications moved towards facebook and teamspeak. And after dropping out of the local gaming scene I stopped operating it altogether -- if I am the only one using a comms-infrastructure its kinda moot, even if it's a federated system. I had some contacts outside of the gaming-bubble but by the time no one seemed to have used it anymore.