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.
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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?
Don’t go into slack or discord unless you are able to access every possible chat room. People are weird, neighbors are wierded, neighbors online are absolutely toxic. Theonly alternative is that you have access of all chat logs in the app. Setting up mattermost on a vps would work, but I think there are better options for what app to use. Funny enough Next loud can do everything you want it to do, including slack-lile chat rooms, VoIP, email, contact management, cloud storage, web portal, and you still have access to the logs (in case something wrong happens).
Make it easier for people to walk places in the neighborhood and then setup block parties and other in person events
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
Hire a management company and use the software they have. For the little engagement you’re going to have, it’s worth it to outsource the management of it to someone else.
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…
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.
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)
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?
If you want it to be an actual community service, then you want it to be something that outlives your residence, your tenure as event coordinator, and your interest in being the neighborhood IT guy. It’ll be much easier to transfer control of a VPS to your successor than to give them hardware that also hosts a bunch of your personal services.
You can start with a very small, nearly free VPS while you recruit users & scale up as (if) anyone bites. Probably even get the HOA to pay for it.
Very wise, consider me convinced
I’m as much of a nerd as the next guy, but hanging out with my HOA president? Probably the second to last thing I would ever want to do on this planet, and the last being living in a HOA.
No one is going to be interested in…whatever you’re trying to setup. Sorry buddy
