So I live on a private road with 6 homes. The neighbors are all close, and we like our little hood.
We have a spotty email chain that people kinda fall off of, and some people hit "Reply" instead of "Reply All", and some people create new emails and forget to add someone, and yadda yadda.
So I bought the URL for my street. Let's say it's 14thStreetSouth.com, and I have hosted it with Google Sites.
I want to create something useful for the neighborhood... maybe a list of neighbors and their phone numbers, and an email address - humansof@14thstreetsouth.com - or something that people can send email to, that automatically goes to the whole neighborhood.
A mailing list, as it were.
In the olden days, I'd have set up a MailChimp mailing list and and PHPBB bulletin board, but fuck that. That's too much work to manage nowadays.
There HAS to be something easier/simpler, without going over to the human cesspool that is neighborhood.com, or whateverthehell that terrible site is called.
What are my options, nowadays, Geeks O'Hubski?
Or, what should I do with this URL that I haven't thought of yet...?
I completely forgot about groups.io! Looks like it might be just the right thing. No ads. No tracking. And both a Free version, and a reasonable monthly fee version ($20). That may be the right solution for my neighborhood... sure, it doesn't use my fancy URL, but it does get us all on the same page/group with easy management features... I like it.
As shitty as it is, we haven't really found a better way to communicate other than google groups. Once a year, someone brings up how shitty it is and there's a push to move to slack (which has even been successful once) but then people never check notifications on there, so whatever messages you send are seen by half the people intended.
I wish I could jump in with some fresh solution, but for me the most effective way to wrangle communications with a group of people, from studies to work to RPGs, is and has been email. Discord can be annoying, doesn't always handle notifications properly and IM platforms aren't well-suited to long-form messages anyway. Social networks are same problems in an even worse package. I'd offer to set up and manage a PHP BB forum for you, but aside from being swamped, you'd pretty much doxx yourself to some fucko from Eastern Europe. :P