Why Matrix when XMPP exists? Much less of a pain to setup on hosted as well as to self-maintain.

If more than one of expenditure, storage or service continuity are a concern, I’d strongly recommend against Matrix, at least a self-hosted one. It’s one of those nu-protocols that’s quite resource intensive compared to perfectly serviceable alternatives from the '90s or '00s. I’d instead recommend something based on XMPP, such as a Prosody / Snikket server (with the advice that you’ll have to configure some more stuff for privacy). Client apps on Android and web at least are also readily available.

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.

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).

THAT!

Interestŋ to see a ŋ in the wild, to accompany the þ posts!

But the governments that are penalizing social media, were already penalizing most of those stuff as well. In particular face-to-face, community activities and anything that could be understood as a third space.

So S702 has expired.

So the headline is fake news?

It’s expired.

But, as my arts teacher used to say, things are only illegal if someone files charges against you. Until someone actually does, S702 is as well as unexpired.