I recently moved into a new development dystopian American burboclave. I ran unopposed for head of the home owner association’s events committee, and I want to foster an actual community with stuff like game nights, holiday parties, team sports and the like. Right now, the only digital space we have is a WhatsApp (🤮) group chat with like 1/2 the community in it. Going forward, I’d like a feature set like Discord or Slack (polls, roles, channels, voip, moderation, decent mobile & desktop browser experience, etc.) that we can physically host in the community. Nice-to-haves are containerization, backup, migration, and high availability mirroring. Incidentally, I’d love to get ideas on hardware I could host this on. I hear used corporate blade-style servers are good bang for your buck, but I don’t know how to begin shopping for one of those.
tl;dr newby friendly SW and HW for self hosting a Discord-esque platform? Apologies if this is a low-effort or a Let Me Google That For You situation; I’m baby
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Have the physical game nights, skip all the computer stuff. The other residents aren’t going to be interested in all that.
How might I find people nearby that would like to join, and then coordinate details? Knocking on doors has gone poorly.
Leverage whatsapp and hang good old posters around the neighborhood?
I’m not sure if NextDoor is available in your area but a lot of people dig that sort of thing. Maybe you could put the word out leveraging NextDoor along with some posters around the neighborhood…
People aren’t going to want to download a bunch of stuff they don’t know about to hang out with the HOA for game nights…
The main problem with HOAs is lonely bored people who want something to do.
Most people would rather pretend the HOA doesn’t exist until it’s needed for an actual issue.
I agree, that’s why I was hoping for something that would work well in-browser: no additional download required. It’s me: the lonely bored person that wants something to do. I’ve tried going door to door, but people around here haaaate that.
…take the hint and go make your own friends to do activities with lol
Something people would actually use is a message board.
One of the simple cut and paste forums and pay the $10/month to get it hosted.
Just have people text you to approve registration, something you can verify people are really in the neighborhood
Oh man the only thing worse than having to join a community WhatsApp would be a community discord or slack
Hard disagree, it wouldn’t be compulsory and whatsapp is dogshit feature wise. Making friends as an adult is hard; I’d kill for a way to find people that live walking distance from me that want to play D&D.
I’d much rather organize dnd with you over WhatsApp than deal with whatever it is you want to do
Youre making it even more difficult to have friends
If only half the estate is on WhatsApp, you will get even less on the rest.
Maybe make a website with basic info, what’s happening etc, but that’s probably it. ( Unless you have a very young road)
What do the people in the development want? Surely you have meetings that people attend.
Go meet them, talk to them in person, find out what they want. Knock on doors if you have to.
Find out what other community groups do that’s successful. Or what this org has done in the past that’s been successful.
Discord might be fun for you, but you’re not doing it for you, you need to meet them where they are.
Non-federated Matrix server with rooms bridged to Discord/Whatsapp/Slack/whatever, so everyone can join.
Use standard webapps for other stuff like polls, surveys, events etc and send the URL to an announcement channel. Not sure of exact solutions but if one app can do it all and send email reminders for them, thatd be great. Same can be done for VoIP with Jitsi links, or even Z**m links.
Backup the databases if you need the chat logs. All of this should be doable with a small VPS, but a mini PCs cluster could be better
Having gone through it, a matrix server is not newbie friendly yet.
(Though I agree that’s a great idea)
I had no idea that bridges like this existed; looking at the matrix bridge docs this looks perfect! And I’ve heard good things about matrix in general. Good point that using a combination of apps is more realistic than trying to find one that does everything.
PieFed does events and polls, fyi.
Also check out rocket chat, it’s a FOSS self hostable slack clone.
Get a job in pizza delivery, you’re sure to meet some interesting characters that way.
As a start it might be better to rent a VPS or so with a service that does backups etc for you. It will be hard to convince people to use it, and issues like dataloss or longer downtimes will kill it for sure.
Also, a large rack server is total overkill for what you want with a few hundred members at most.
Good points. For the hardware, there are additional things I’d like to self host (personal website, media server, game servers, etc.) so I was imagining hardware I could grow into. I have a trial setup (git, lemmy, and apostrophe CMS managed by portainer + nginx + Heimdall) on my gaming pc that seems to work well and which I’d like to make a permanent version of. Definitely not married to having a blade, but I definitely want to go on premises. If there’s downtime, it’ll be because of an internet/power outage affecting the neighborhood, so no one’ll be trying to access it anyway. Adoption will be hard either way (the people I live around are mired in the metaverse 😭) and I’m open to suggestions on that as well.
Wouldn’t they especially want a working communication channel in case there is an extended power outage?
