You don’t need to allow other people on your server.
If you start your own server, you moderate yourself.
Whether others want to federate with your server is up to them.
What platform? Windows? Unix? Linux?
I don’t understand why some people get so confused either. It’s just like choosing an e-mail provider.
Create the account, try it out, if you don’t like it, delete it. If you do like it, keep it. How hard can this be? Then again, it apparently is.
The client apps might help out by including an account creation wizard.
Or to put it in other words: what features are lacking?
Do people seriously miss ‘awards’ and other not very interesting functions.
What will Apple do if they if the EU continues their plans with regard to client side scanning? That’s not one country, but many.
Apple previously planned on introducing client side scanning, but backed out after they received a high amount of critique.