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).
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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Make it easier for people to walk places in the neighborhood and then setup block parties and other in person events
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?
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.
Iโd 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
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
In a very similar situation to you 4 years ago and we eventually just went with a community Facebook page because itโs 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?"
NodeBB or maybe piefed to host announcements and provide a place for questions and feedback.
Consider creating an account for each household with a "correct horse battery staple" style password that's easy to input on mobile, print out a little slip of paper with an explanation blurb and account name & password, and deposit in their mailbox.
Do not expect any users until you've hosted several game nights that had multiple attendees. From what you say you are the events committee, not the online life committee. I would thus recommend to stay focused on events until people bring up, unprompted, a desire for more casual day-to-day interactions. You want to be integrating into their existing habits, not trying to replace them. Let the "switching" happen on their own initiative lest they feel like they're being co-opted for your own personal agenda.
Also, no federation on the NodeBB/piefed unless/until the users overwhelmingly ask for it.
Hire a management company and use the software they have. For the little engagement youโre going to have, itโs worth it to outsource the management of it to someone else.
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.
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)
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..
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.
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
Get a job in pizza delivery, youโre 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 ๐ญ) 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