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.
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.