No per-seat fees, no landlord, no shutdown notice: phpBB gives your community the complete bulletin board package on a server you own. Organize discussion into categories holding unlimited forums and subforums, each with its own rules, password, style, or redirect, and let members post in flat topics with quoting, BBCode formatting, file attachments, polls, smilies, and emoji. Members register through configurable anti-spam checks, subscribe to forums and topics, keep bookmarks, exchange private messages with folders and drafts, and get notified about replies and mentions in their notification center. Moderators work from their own control panel with approval queues, reported-post handling, warnings, topic tools, pruning, and bans by username, email, or IP range, while the famous permission system assigns forum, moderator, and admin roles per user or group and can trace exactly why any member can or cannot do something. Administrators run everything from the ACP: styles built on the responsive prosilver theme, extensions installed from the validated catalog, language packs for a global audience, search and cache backends, scheduled tasks, and database backups. Whether it is a support board, a hobbyist community, or a company knowledge commons, the conversation stays on infrastructure you own. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-2.0 licensed.

Mbin is a federated community platform that mixes magazine-based link aggregation and threaded discussion with short-form microblogging, so one self-hosted instance works as both a Reddit-style forum and a Mastodon-style social feed. Members create magazines around topics, then post links, articles, photos, and videos into them, vote submissions up or down, boost the best ones to their followers, and argue the details in threaded comment trees. The microblog stream sits beside the magazines for quick status posts, and a combined view blends both content types into a single feed you can sort by hot, new, active, or most commented. Because the whole platform speaks ActivityPub, your magazines and users federate with Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Pleroma, and PeerTube, and follows, replies, and votes travel across instance boundaries in both directions. Magazine owners appoint moderators, pin threads, and handle reports, while instance admins control registration, federation allow and block lists, and which remote servers the instance talks to. Readers shape their own view with subscriptions to magazines, people, and tags, plus personal blocks for users, magazines, and entire instances. A documented REST API with OAuth 2.0 access lets mobile clients, bots, and integrations read and publish content, and Service-type accounts are supported for automated posters. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

From the German "zusammen," together: Zusam is a private social space for a group of friends - a self-hosted alternative to the family WhatsApp group or the friends Facebook group, with no ads, algorithms, or data harvesting in between. The AGPLv3 project is deliberately modest in scope and stack: a Symfony PHP backend exposing a REST API over SQLite, with a lightweight Preact single-page frontend, designed for a low server footprint that runs comfortably on small hardware. Groups post messages into shared feeds that handle real life well: video and image uploads (with FFmpeg processing), photo albums for trips and events, and rich link previews with inline embeds for YouTube, Vimeo, Imgur, SoundCloud, Twitch, and Bandcamp - so sharing a song or a clip looks the way it should. When something needs to leave the circle, public link generation exposes a single message to non-members without opening the group. The interface is fully responsive and mobile-friendly, targeting Firefox ESR and recent Chrome. It is the small-web answer to a real question: where does a group chat's shared history live when you want it owned by the group instead of a platform?