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.



If you plan on federating, it can end up being pretty resource heavy, so consider either not federating or planning ahead.
What’s the federation like? Haven’t decided on it yet. Realistically I may convince 10ish people to join so I’m not sure it be worth the hassle.
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.