aprehendedmerlin

For that stuff yes it is. For casual micro blogging private friends community with approval only sign-ups it is still fine if that's even possible. Some here suggest me hubzilla is a great fit for me

I should have mentioned. Micro blogging would be great for us.

OK thanks hubzilla instance is a good fit then

Thanks that sounds good enough gonna look into it

That's my mistake I didn't explain everything clearly. Yes my community is media post oriented but not the kind of media that would be that heavy or dangerous that my government gonna care about that much. It's not that serious. I have another plan for that kind of communication we gonna run a Matrix server. This micro blogging or forum platform I'm looking for right now is going to be casual and my friends only. I just want to be able to control sign-ups and be sure all outsiders only see a sign-up form page that's it security at rest on server is not an issue here

Thanks one thing you said really peaked my interest. Can I run a Mastodon instance but in a private community way? I mean only approved sign-ups requests and only my instance members can see anything to others it's just a sign-up form page also obviously no federation needed. Can I have this with Mastodon? That would be exactly my dream. If the data in unencrypted in sever storage. That's not an issue I'm gonna setup an Matrix server for that like you said

This sounds good gonna check it thanks

Thanks but I can not use Invision even if I wanted to. Remember I'm Iranian. All western and international payment systems are sanctioned for us. I can not pay them even if I wanted to that's why I was looking for open source solutions

Yeah that's what I thought too. It's just not what the fediverse made for

Thanks yes Matrix is great for privacy not so great for my heavily multimedia oriented content community that I don't know what to do about. Micro blogging would be a great fit for us but can't find a private solution for it

Thanks I thought about it too. You think running a Mastodon instance defederated from everyone would be a good idea? How private can I get this I prefer to lockdown whole sign up process to approved only applications and no one other than the members should be able to see the community content

Thanks and You are absolutely right I thought about hosting forum on a VPS and also found about discourse and Flarum and humhub. One thing as an Iranian I should consider is that there is no international payment system available here and even if I used the third party payments available here we are sanctioned to the Moon and if they found out I'm Iranian they gonna terminate my access for sure. So you see hosting open-source solutions is the only way then I found Flarum and humhub both don't look bad but one thing I have be sure about to what extent these platforms support media posting I know my community they want to post mostly multimedia stuff and a forum is a bad fit for that that's why I was looking for a micro blogging platform. See this is the hurdle I don't know how to solve yet