The synapse demo was a bit flakey in terms of supporting federation. It turns out that if your computer resolved `localhost` to `::1` instead of `127.0.0.1`, the built-in federation blacklist specified in `start.sh` would still block it, since it contained an entry for `::/127`. Removing this no longer prevents Synapse from contacting `::1`, federation works again on these boxes.
Andrew Morgan