For groups that would rather not be somebody's product
You built the group.Facebook owns it.
Your posts reach whoever the feed decides. Your members read ads between them. Anybody who has deleted their account cannot take part at all, and if the group is ever removed you lose the lot at once — the members, the archive, and every way of telling anybody where you went. A place of your own has none of those problems.
“Only a fraction of the group ever sees a post.”
There is no feed here and nothing is ranked. A notice sits in the forum you put it in, everybody in the group can see it, and it can go out by email as well. Reach is not a thing you have to buy back.
“People who left Facebook can't be in the group.”
Your board is a link. Anybody can read the public forums with no account of any kind, and joining takes an email address — no company in the middle, and nobody excluded for having quit one.
“If the group goes, everything goes.”
A group can be removed overnight, by a report or a mistake, with no appeal that reaches a person. Your board is your domain and your database on a machine you rent. Backups are one command, and nobody else can switch it off.
“Try finding a post from last spring.”
Threads stay where they were put, in forums you organised, and search reaches back through the whole archive. The group's good posts stop being something you half-remember and cannot produce.
What you actually get back
The group, and the list, are yours.
The thing a Facebook group never gives you is a way to reach your own members. You cannot export them, you cannot email them, and if the group goes you have no way of telling anybody where you went. That is the arrangement, and it is the one worth leaving.
- You can reach everybody, directly
- Members join with an email address and the board sends notices to it. Nothing depends on somebody happening to open an app, and no ranking sits between you and the people who joined on purpose.
- And you can leave with all of it
- The archive is a database on your own machine. Take a backup, move it to another server, or hand the whole thing over to whoever runs the group after you.
None of which is really a feature. It is the absence of a landlord.
What the group gets
The group you thought you already had.
Four of the things that change on the first day. Each is also a link, because the page asserts and the document argues.
A room for everyone, and one for the committee
Open forums for the whole community, a members-only floor, a committee room nobody else knows is there. Who can read, post, search or reply is decided per member, per forum — and every way into the board, search and feeds included, obeys the same rules.
How permissions work →
Years of answers, still findable
Search that knows a thread about your question beats a passing mention of it, and stays quick however deep the archive goes. The answer somebody wrote years ago keeps earning its keep.
How search holds up →
Bots stay out, people get in
A trap only bots fall into, questions you write about your own community, and a first post held for somebody to glance at — which matters more in a juvenile section than it does anywhere else. No puzzle grids, and no stranger deciding who is human enough to join.
How the spam controls work →
It looks like your community, not like software
Your colours, your crest, light and dark — restyle the whole thing or install a different theme entirely. A theme can only change how the board looks, never whether it works, so a new coat of paint can never cost you the board.
How themes work →
Coming from a Facebook group
Start fresh, and pin the link.
There is no way to export a Facebook group — not the posts, not the members, not the photographs. That is Facebook's decision rather than ours, and it is most of the argument for going.
So run both for a season. Pin the link, let the board fill with the things worth keeping, and watch which conversations move on their own. The people who quietly left Facebook years ago turn up first.
The bit people worry about
“But who's going to run it?”
Somebody in your community already does this for a living, or near enough — every club has one and every project has three. This is a job for them, and it is smaller than they will expect: about half an hour, once, and then it runs. What it needs is a server, a domain, and nobody's permission.
The whole job, by hand. The guided route is the same four containers, with the panel typing the secrets in for you.
Guided, with Coolify
A panel installed on the same server — still your machine, not a service you sign up to. Point it at the repository and it generates the secrets and the database password, issues the certificate, tells the board its own address, and redeploys on push.
Nothing is typed in. About twenty minutes.
Or by hand, if they would rather
The same four containers without the panel — Postgres, a one-shot migration the others wait on, the web server, and the worker that runs the background tick. A clone, an .env with three generated secrets, one command, and a reverse proxy they already run.
Postgres and nothing else — no Redis, no broker, no search cluster.
What it costs
A small board is happy on a VPS of about €15 a month, and a busy one wants a bigger machine — that part scales with your board the way anything does.
What never changes is what the bill follows. It follows the machine, never the membership: two hundred members cost exactly what twenty do, and there is no tier that unlocks the private forum.
Still quick a decade in
Reading never drags.
Long threads, deep pages, a search across everything ever written — pages come back before anyone wonders whether the board is busy, and they keep doing it as the archive grows. Ten years of history is a feature of your community rather than a weight on it.
Measured, not asserted: against a board of 2.3M posts, a thread page renders in 3.3 ms at the 95th percentile — and a run over its 50 ms budget fails the build.
Coming from somewhere else
Bring the archive if you have one.
A MyBB board imports whole, and the importer is resumable, so a decade of history moves across several sittings rather than one long night. Old links keep working, so every URL anybody ever posted still lands.
Coming from a chat platform or a Facebook group is different, and it is worth being straight about it: there is usually no clean way to get your history out of one. That is their decision rather than ours.
The licence
Yours to keep.
Meith is free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3. Run a board on it for anything at all, commercially included, without publishing a line of your configuration or a word your members wrote. Nobody can put a price on it later, and nobody can switch it off.
- Themes and plugins are yours
- Both fill an interface this software provides, which is the case the Lesser GPL exists to allow. License yours however you like — it is not obliged to be LGPL because the board it runs in is.
- Changes to Meith come back
- Modify the board itself and those changes carry the same licence to whoever you hand the modified version to. That is the copyleft, and it is the whole of what is asked.
Which is the point of choosing it: the version you are running stays free software whatever anybody decides later, and anybody can carry it on.
Read the licence — GNU Lesser General Public License v3
LGPLv3 is additional permissions on top of the GNU GPL, which it incorporates. Both texts are in the repository, and both travel with any copy you pass on.
Not quite you?
The same board, argued four other ways.
It is one piece of software underneath. What changes is which of its problems you recognise — so there is a page for each.
Sports clubs
Fixtures, notices, subs and a committee room — for GAA, soccer, and any club run by volunteers in their own time.
Meith for sports clubs →
Residents' associations
A noticeboard the whole road can reach — including the neighbours who will not go near Facebook.
Meith for residents' associations →
Discord & Slack communities
Keep the server. Give the answers worth keeping somewhere they will still be next year.
Meith for Discord & Slack communities →
Gaming clans
Rosters, builds and recruitment that do not scroll up the channel — and something an applicant can read before they join.
Meith for gaming clans →
Own the group you built.
At your own address, on a machine of your own, in about half an hour. Have a look at a real board first.
- A machine
- Your own, with Docker
- A domain
- Pointed at it
- Everything else
- Comes up beside it