NoahRaketic
Right, I should have said "an onion-like network" or some such instead of 'TOR network'. Sorry, that was sloppy of me.
Eirikr70
Self-hosting is tricky with a privacy-first approach, because a publicly-reachable server is going to be much easier to trace back to you, for most threat models. And hiding it behind a VPN or similar isn't feasible since you want the service to be connectable from the outside. You need something like onion networks, I2P or similar in order to have a reasonably anonymous server.
I say this as someone currently self-hosting a dozen services, all of them exposed to the public internet. For a while that included a Jitsi server for my IRL friend group chats - but I while that certainly protected the content of our conversation as much as possible, I am sure that any mass surveillance system would have immediately noticed that those people were connecting to a server in my house (which I was perfectly OK with, since the fact that I knew those people was not a secret in any way).
Self-hosting, for me, is for anything I want to control but that I don't mind being traced back to me by governments, megacorps, or hobby sleuths. If I want to have unfettered, anonymous conversation that I don't want to be traced back to me in any way, I would go with a good decentralized system and actively avoid hosting it on my systems.