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
Edit: thank you all very much for your thoughts and advice. I’ll research and test the software that was suggested with the knowledge that the site I stand up will likely be used by few or no people.
In a very similar situation to you 4 years ago and we eventually just went with a community Facebook page because it’s what most people are already on and use. I hate it. Not a good answer but even discord was too niche. Only 59 homes in my community though. You may have more luck with larger groups.
Also, community building has mostly been a flop. That stuff is hard.
Yeah, I hate facebook too, but sometimes you just have to acknowledge that flying the FOSS flag is not your primary objective. Like someone else said, if you have half the people on whatsapp, you’ll get much less than that with anything else.
I occasionally dream of having a better “community” in my suburb but basically, I just have zero available effort to invest in that. Like I’m not working today and looking forward to spending the afternoon in my pyjamas fiddling around at home. If I feel super motivated and energetic later I might take the kids somewhere. If there were a community thing scheduled I just… wouldn’t feel like going.
I think the best form of community I can manage is simply having a few people’s numbers in my phone and telling them when something happens “Hey Barb, just letting you know the neighbours car got broken into last night, hows things down your end?”