Preference of community hosting instead of self hosting has recently come up in a permacomputing chat, and in this sense I am trying to set up a tiny yunohost server that can serve my local alternative community - a series of mostly rural living people spread throughout the landscape around a small towns. I want to support local barter and trade, local tool sharing and connections between people.

I am trying to feel my way towards what functions could be useful for a mostly non-tech community, and what is out there to self-host? And what is especially useful and makes sense for local communities? Event calendar, small ads and some sort of map functions come to mind, what else? I guess a lot of what Facebook does.

As I don’t see myself in the position to replace Facebook anytime soon but would like to pave the way towards having Facebook and the like replaced by many small scale solutions like the server I am building, I would like the server to have other useful stuff. Currently using CryptPad for collaborative editing, got a SearXNG instance and a digital book shelf with stuff related to gardening, foraging, homesteading, renewables, but none of this is really local. Maybe offering people a small portfolio website where they can put their offerings, skills?

I currently have an Epicyon instance installed that does all of this, it has skill sharing, item sharing, even a calendar, and I really like what it does - but I’m afraid it might be a little tough on the non-tech users.

Please dump your suggestions and ideas about what could live on such a server. As I am still a baby admin I’m not too far in to notice that people’s eyes glaze over when I mention things like ‘server’ or ‘search engine’. Trying to keep it intuitive enough for a big enough group might be a challenge, especially when keeping it all clean and FOSS. Probably needs to work really well on mobile phone as well.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
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    9 months ago

    Since a lot of local community activities can be captured in photos, maybe a Pixelfed instance might work? It comes with easy to use apps like Pixeldroid that should feed similar to anyone that has used Instagram before. They also plan to add groups soon, which might work well for organizing things.

  • jadero@slrpnk.net
    0·
    9 months ago

    Excellent! I’ve just started my own investigations in the same direction, so please keep us posted on your progress.

    Have you looked at Friendica? It requires more of a server than what I’ve got, but it looks pretty good to me.

    A couple of days ago, I set up a GoToSocial instance. It’s still alpha software, but it looks pretty good so far and is a lot less resource intensive than Mastodon. It’s also server-only, but the clients I tried all worked with it just fine.

    I’ve been able to follow people on regular Mastodon instances, but haven’t interacted outside my instance beyond mere following.

    It was easy to get going on “bare metal” (no Docker), although I had to start over once because of a documentation gotcha. (The instructions as-is will leave you with an old version instead of the newest version.)

    FWIW, I wrote up my experiences here.

    For truly personal servers (single account), there is seppo.social, but I haven’t figured out how to actually getting it running! 🤷

    • schmorp@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Interesting writeup, thanks for sharing! Friendica seems … friendly and reassuringly boring, I did a test install and will have a look at the details in the next days.