A lot of protocols took off in part because of university adoption and it took off from there. It wasn't the only thing but it certainly planted seeds in impressionable minds.

If universities and governmental orgs start reliably running their own Matrix servers like they did with email before contracting that out I think it will happen.

How is that going ?

It’s going pretty well actually - see https://matrix.org/blog/2023/03/15/the-dma-stakeholder-works.... Also lots of work like https://turt2live.github.io/ietf-mimi-linearized-matrix/draf... going on around it too.

Related: http://matrix.org/blog/2022/02/03/digital-markets-act-and-in...