Okay buddy, you are way overthinking this. I'm not trying to create the next change.org here. The scope of this is a petition to put a stop sign on main street and get maybe 50 people to sign on.
I could always use a Google Form or a Wordpress plugin for this, I thought there might be a more private way to go about it.
I did not expect all of this debate over a software recommendation, haha.
For your information, petitions can be quite effective at the local level. The problem is, if you sign a petition on Change.org or something like that, they start bombarding you with emails to sign other similar petitions (kind of like the recommendation algorithms on sites like Youtube or Facebook).
People who sign these things know full well what they are doing. Advocacy is not anonymous. I am guess the folks giving me grief about asking for a petition tool won't sign them, and that's fine. I just don't see why there is so much hate.
Another option I considered is a form to mail script. I thought that this is a common use case and something would already exist, haha.
All apps collect some information. Piefed requires your email to sign up.
I don't want the free petition websites online getting my personal network's info and sharing or selling it, hence the interest in self hosting.
Linus Tech Tips did an exposé on those boxes a few years ago
I'm not the creator of this program, but its too fun not to share! The comments from the developer and users joining the swarms on the reddit thread are hilarious.
It's basically a decentralized swarm of docker users. It does nothing except tell you how many other users you are connected to. Some are in the tens of thousands, haha!
The devs at SearXNG have a bot that regularly scans the public instances for changes to the source code and delists them as a public instance if it's altered.
If you go to https://searx.space/, they show the results of the scans for each instance.
The software is free and open source. You are encouraged to inspect the code yourself to make sure no data is collected!
Here is the source code:
There is also a list of publicly operated SearXNG instances at https://searx.space/. We host the one at https://search.freestater.org/, and there are plenty of other good ones.
Respectfully... if someone came here looking for a note-taking app, would you recommend pad and paper?
I am not looking for advice on my local issue advocacy, I am looking for a software solution to host a petition.
I think cryptpad will do the job.