Hi guys, same Iranian guy here, first I want to say I really appreciate you guys helping me, love you guys you all are genuinely amazing people.
I read all your comments in my previous post and one thing I realized I’m not qualified for this at all. This is too dangerous and puts my life and many of my friends at risk.
So in the spirit of being pragmatic here and finding best solution meanwhile I figure that out. Where can we have a private community with moderation and admin tools and multi-topic discussions on the fediverse? Is that even a thing? I know that’s not how fediverse works so the answer is probably a hard No. Then where should we go? Discord have all this but that’s not my preference at all. I know Reddit has private subs but I don’t like reddit like many of you guys. What is the compromise here what do you suggest I should do?
If you want a community that is, at its foundational level, private, then you don’t want it to be in the Fediverse. I don’t mean it in an empathetic level but rather on a technical level. There are far better tools such as forum services for small communities, and you would be not wasting the second most distinctive feature of fediverse software (that of federation).
As for where can you have such a community, that is better split in two questions: 1.- what software to use and 2.- where to host it.
Question 1 suggests the use of any of a myriad of forum solutions, suchas phpBB or Discourse, that can be hosted or even self-hosted; as well as suggest the use of some goof practices such as having a back-channel communication system between high-level collaborators that uses a different medium/platform (say, Signal).
Question 2 highly involves your threat model if you want to do something that might put you and other people’s lives at risk, but does not really mandate or prescribe which solutions you’d pick for question 1 otherwise. As I have not followed your conversations that closely, the most I can do is to suggestlow-tier VPS platforms that offer wide-range services (everything from forums to videoconference to blogs) so that there is less of a chance that it gets blocked; or otherwise use some sort of local net mesh (eg.: radio).
Thanks and You are absolutely right I thought about hosting forum on a VPS and also found about discourse and Flarum and humhub. One thing as an Iranian I should consider is that there is no international payment system available here and even if I used the third party payments available here we are sanctioned to the Moon and if they found out I’m Iranian they gonna terminate my access for sure. So you see hosting open-source solutions is the only way then I found Flarum and humhub both don’t look bad but one thing I have be sure about to what extent these platforms support media posting I know my community they want to post mostly multimedia stuff and a forum is a bad fit for that that’s why I was looking for a micro blogging platform. See this is the hurdle I don’t know how to solve yet
Ooof… right that’s a very complicated position. You’d need a forum or microblogging platform that can be hosted to convenience (cheap price / gratis; ideally away from Nine Eyes and from Iran eyes). As for the media storage requirement, if your community is going to be media-heavy, that’s a lot more damage on the long term: either you host the media and run the risk of delivering a lot of private info when caught (most media uploads are not sanitized for privacy, nor people know how to do that), or you don’t host the media yourself and count on the users uploading it to somewhere else that you’ll have to “moderately” depend on.
If I were you, I’d think hard and long whether media (especially heavy media, such as videos) is that much important as to have to do the hosting by yourself or whichever group you are organizing. Any way you can find of getting out of that hurdle will be good for costs, for mental health (moderation etc) and for security (as I mentioned above, as well as other factors). Torrenting heavy media files or going Cuban aka.: distribute through a physical network of hidden flash drive caches, might be available options.