Congrats Toby! I came across esotalk when I was evaluating forums for flockport a year ago and I liked the minimalism then. I would have gone for it but it was being phased out for Flarum. We eventually looked at Discourse and Nodebb and went with the latter.
I just added a Flarum container to Flockport - https://www.flockport.com/store - for those who want to give it a quick spin. You can use LXC to try it, and it most likely will work with Systemd Nspawn for those who have a recent version of Systemd.
@Toby - I am sure you are familiar with Linux containers. Flockport uses Linux containers to make a lot of popular apps easy to try for end users . They do not need to install or configure anything, simply launch the container and they can enter the admin screen on the browser to access the app. However you need to have some basic knowledge of Linux and Linux containers so it may not be the best for completely new users.