alt Hacker News> It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd).
Whether it matters depends very much on what sort of organization you are.
Discord is a multinational for-profit corporation planning an IPO. It takes payments from users in those countries, likely partners with companies in those countries, and likely wants to sell stock to investors in those countries. Every one of those countries has the ability to punish Discord if it does not obey their laws, even if it does not have a physical presence there.
The situation is likely quite different for most of the 23,306 Matrix servers that federate widely. The worst thing Australia, for example could do to one of their operators is make it legally hazardous for them to visit Australia.
The Matrix server is open source. https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse The Element client is also open source. https://github.com/element-hq/element-web
It does not actually need to be configured in a federated state and frankly scales better when it's not. The login can be tied to anything or use it's own. From a modern SAML SSO to an old school forum.
You can run one for a few friends and it scales just as well as a private discord for a few friends. Just need persistent storage for media uploads if people are sharing video a lot.