Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.



I’m not trying to say that you can’t/shouldn’t federate with others. You don’t need to federate everything, all channels, etc, nor should you IMO. I found out really quickly that the small server I had set aside for it was not up to the task when I decided to sync up the matrix.org main channels. You need lots of ram, FAST storage, and a good internet connection at bare minimum.
Oh man, I think I just need Synapse and not the full ESS suite. May have been making this harder than I needed.
If you just need a chat server for your and some friends and family, that is almost certainly will work for you.
Nice. I was feeling way over my head with ESS. Thanks!
Sure, no problem. I’m sure you’ll get a basic server up and running, it isn’t too bad.