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.