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
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