For residents' associations, tenants' groups and neighbourhood committees
Not everyone is on the app.They still live here.
A residents' association does not get to choose its members — everybody on the road is one, whether they use Facebook or not. Meith gives your neighbourhood a noticeboard anybody can reach with a link: collections and roadworks that do not scroll away, a committee room for the accounts, and nothing ranked by an algorithm.
“It's on Facebook, and half the road won't go near it.”
A board is a link you can put through a letterbox. Anybody can read the public forums with no account of any kind, and joining takes an email address — a much easier thing to ask of a neighbour than a Facebook account.
“The bin notice was three days ago. It's gone.”
A notice stays in the forum you put it in until somebody moves it. Nothing is ranked, nothing hides behind “see more”, and it can go out by email so it reaches the people who would never think to look.
“Somebody asks the same question every spring.”
Threads stay where they were put, and search reaches back through all of them. The answer about the management company from two years ago is still the answer, and whoever asks can find it without asking.
“Who actually owns that group?”
Whoever made the Facebook group owns it, and takes it with them when they move away or fall out with the committee. A board belongs to the association: your domain, your database, your list, handed on with the rest of the paperwork.
The thing nobody thinks about until it happens
It outlives the committee that set it up.
Every residents' group has heard the story: the person who made the group moves away, or falls out with the committee, and eleven years of the road's business goes with them. A Meith board cannot go that way, because none of it sits inside anybody's personal account.
- It belongs to the association, not to a member
- The board lives at a domain the association pays for, on a server the association rents. Handing it to next year's committee is handing over a password, not asking somebody a favour.
- And it can be handed on whole
- The archive is a database you hold, backups are one command, and the software is free software — so a committee that would rather move it elsewhere, or run it themselves, is free to do exactly that.
Which is worth saying plainly, because it is the only arrangement here where nobody can lock the road out of its own noticeboard.
What the association gets
A noticeboard, and the room behind it.
Four of the things that matter when the membership is everybody on the road rather than everybody who signed up. Each is also a link to the document that argues it.
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 put the link through the doors.
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 a fair part of the reason to leave.
So most associations start the board fresh and let the two run side by side for a season. The neighbours who were never on Facebook tend to arrive first, which is the whole point.
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 →
Discord & Slack communities
Keep the server. Give the answers worth keeping somewhere they will still be next year.
Meith for Discord & Slack communities →
Facebook groups
You built the group. Facebook owns the reach, the members and the archive — and can close it tomorrow.
Meith for Facebook groups →
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 →
Give the road a noticeboard of its own.
At an address the association owns, on a machine it rents, 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