To install Carbon, all you need to do is drop the plugin into your server's plugins folder, and start the server. The rest of the file creation will be handled by the plugin the first time you start it.
Setting up Carbon is fairly simple. For the basics, you go into the configuration folder and edit the default channel settings to have the attributes you desire it to have. This includes a set of system messages that appear when the default channel is interacted with, the formats for groups named default and staff, and several context options, all of which apply by default to any channel you create. To override these, simply add the settings in another channel name below and within that channel, those added settings will apply.
Most of the settings in the default configuration are intended as examples, and it is encouraged that you modify them in order to achieve your desired chat format. Contexts, which are options included in the config, are disabled by default, though they can be also easily be modified to match your desired specifications.
For Carbon to start up, you need PlaceholderAPI and Vault. This is in order to retrieve groups, prefixes, and other essential formatting from a permissions plugin (See Luckperms).
Vault is an API which is able to, for the purposes of this plugin, retrieve group information from a permissions plugin and communicate them to Carbon. It is required to have per-group chat formatting defined, either in the default channel format or in any other channel format. This plugin requires Vault.
PlaceholderAPI or PAPI is an API which is able to pull information from a variety of places, and Carbon is able to use that information in its chat format. For example, you can use the placeholder for a player's prefix, which it will pull fron Vault, or you can even use a placeholder for the amount of time a player has spent on the server, if you have a PAPI extension for it. This plugin requires PlaceholderAPI
So far, this plugin is only tested on Spigot and Paper 1.16.1. Even so, no versions/server softwares are guaranteed to work, though they may and probably will.