[abdullahkhalids]

How easy is it for a high schooler to actually install and run this software for their club? I imagine a teenager who can competently handle a discord server, including setting up bots. But doesn't know much about computers beyond that.

[tripleseven]

Hmm it's quite a bit more complicated than that. You need to be able to run Docker containers (that's the easiest way to run this). There's countless ways to do that nowadays, and internet is full of tutorials. Portainer seems easy to use to solve this problem but I've never tried it. There's a lot of cloud providers that offer running Docker containers though.

[abdullahkhalids]

I understand. The specific critique is: make a product that potential users can actually use.

[tripleseven]

I understand your point and I definitely agree that products should be as easy to use and set up as possible. However, I don't really see a way to make this any easier than it is now, or easier to set up than any other selfhosted project you can find on github.

I'm not targeting high school students (specifically) and it's outside the scope of the project to give a background course in DevOps.

I would argue the software is definitely usable by anyone who has some basic experience with Linux and Docker.

If you have specific ideas on how to make selfhosting this easier, I'm certainly curious.

[whafro]

I think the parent's comment was unfair – you were (roughly) looking to build a self-hosted, open project for those who don't want to pay for hosted options, and that's exactly what you've done. I'm certainly a person who will be keeping this project in mind for the future.

It's fairly obvious that the largest possible audience would want a turn-key, hosted service, and there are paid options that deliver exactly that. I don't suspect that you were aiming to be "the discord of" this field, and the path to getting there is wildly different.

Great work, and kudos on both the initiative and the progress!

[abdullahkhalids]

> In 2007, LimeWire was estimated to be installed on over one-third of all computers globally. [1]

20 years ago, even grandpa could download the LimeWire setup.exe, install it in 1 min, and start hosting and sharing files with anyone on the internet. You would think we would have made progress since then and things would be even easier to host and run. Instead we have regressed: a simple software requires devops expertise to install.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

[tmpz22]

Cool project, I read through the code and it seemed thoughtful and well laid out.

To make this more accessible you'd need to offer a managed version on a cheap vm, at which point you're also managing the overhead of a VM, authentication system, etc. Oof. Obviously out of scope for a side project.

Event organizing is an art. Not just the data but managing payment processing, external communication (email, sms), and other overhead. Godspeed to the folks organizing events and building tools to make it easier.

[tripleseven]

Thanks!

Yes I agree the only way to make it easier is to offer a hosted version. I already offer the demo which is hosted, but I don't (at this time) want to offer a whole service, because of indeed what you mention + I would have to deal with legal stuff like privacy policies etc.