End user of NC here, have it setup on a little Digital Ocean droplet. I switched from OwnCloud shortly after the fork, and sync contacts/calendar/notes between my desktop and android. Pleasantly surprised with how well things work.
My favorite thing to do is upload a short video from my phone, and send my family the share link. Much better than uploading to YouTube / Facebook. I also do photography, and love how easy it is to share a gallery in a few seconds. When I'm done in Lightroom, I just export JPGs to the directory, and copy over the share link to the gallery app. Great user experience!
I'm glad NC is continuing development, and it's interesting that they're adding federation to the client, but I'm not sure it's a feature I'd use. Though I'd like to setup a mastodon instance for myself, there's too much docker/nodejs bloat and hastle, and I've yet to successfully get an instance online. (Even if I did, I'm not sure I'd use it very much.)