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I honestly feel there is a big gap in the market for a good community software.

Something which ties events in the community with messages and also has voice chat and other capabilities on the side.

Discord is popular because there are no free alternatives which does what Discord does poorly.

No one wants to self-host, and normies especially don't want to learn or care about self-hosting. Discord does what it does, normies like it, and people make bots and utilities for Discord because people use it. It's a network effect.

Maybe there's a market for turn-key Mattermost or Matrix hosting? Similar to how you can go and pay for someone to host Wordpress for you.

There are a bunch of people providing turnkey Matrix hosting - e.g. https://element.io/matrix-services from Element, or https://etke.cc/ and https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/.

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