Mastadon? Lemmy? It would probably have to be standalone so people would’t be turned off from the content from the rest of the fediverse unless there’s a way to prevent federated content from showing on the instance. Just a place to post local news and discussions, maybe a place to sell secondhand. I live near a huge college with a major cs program, so I should be able to get users.
Pretty sure lemmy can have the defaults set to local only, so you can keep the federation on, but by default local users only see local stuff.
nodeBB might be a good fit. It’s a forum first, with remote content sort of in the background.
Do you know of any forums using it? Id like to take a look at it.
Yeah, just a modern forum. NodeBB or Discourse, maybe Flarum. The first two even have some experimental federation support and for Flarum it is planned at least.
Maybe Lemmy with federation disabled and use a nice 3rd party UI as the default interface for it. If you want to link up with similar community hubs, you can set federation to allow list mode and only federate with each other.
