I completely support you moving off of Discord, and I completely support you setting up Matrix. I tried a lot, I think it has the most feature parity. That being said, the biggest thing I regret when setting it up is that I went with Synapse for my backend Matrix server, when there are others.

I've heard very good things about Conduit (https://conduit.rs/), mostly that it's easier to stand up and easier to maintain.

Either way, I think it's a smart move, and it's worth the investment. It's not the easiest to stand up, but operationally our communication should be our own. Expect trial and error, getting one piece up and running, then the next, and then the next. Celebrate small wins like "Today I got it running" and then "Today I got federation working", and then "Now I have voice working!". Otherwise it's going to feel overwhelming.

I believe in the cause, so feel free to DM me if you have any questions, or send me a DM on Matrix :)

Oh, and a very useful tool - https://federationtester.matrix.org/

This will tell you exactly what is wrong with your federation.