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
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.