Free and open source · Your own server · No per-member pricing
The group chat forgets.Your community shouldn't.
A GAA club, a Discord server, a residents' association, a Facebook group — the same thing keeps happening. The notice scrolls away. The answer you typed out twice is gone. Half the members never saw it at all. Meith gives your community a place of its own, where nothing gets lost and nobody else decides who sees what.
No ads, no trackers, and no third-party script between your members and your board. Nothing here is priced per member — two hundred of them cost what twenty do.
Who it's for
Find the version of this that is about you.
The argument below is true of every community. What it looks like in practice is not — a club has fixtures and subs, a clan has a roster and applicants, a residents' association has neighbours who will never open Facebook. Each of these is a page of its own.
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 →
Residents' associations
A noticeboard the whole road can reach — including the neighbours who will not go near Facebook.
Meith for residents' associations →
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 →
“It just scrolls away.”
In a chat, the answer you wrote on Tuesday is gone by Thursday. Here it is a thread. It stays where it was put, it is still there in five years, and search reaches all the way back — this season's question turns up last season's answer.
“Somebody else decides who sees it.”
A feed ranks your notice below an ad. A notification setting nobody found buries the AGM. On your own board a notice is a notice: everyone who is in can see it, in the order it was written, and it can go out by email as well.
“Half of them aren't even on it.”
Your treasurer is not on Discord. Plenty of your members will not open a Facebook account, and should not have to. A board is a link — no app to install, no company to join, and nobody shut out of their own community.
“And it isn't really ours.”
Platforms change the rules, put a price on what was free, and close. Your board is your domain, your database, your archive. Take it with you, or fork the software and carry it on. Nobody can take it off you.
Alongside what you already have
Chat is for now. This is for keeps.
You do not have to leave anywhere. Keep the group chat — it is good at what it is good at. Put the things that need to still be true next month somewhere they will survive it.
Leave in the chat
- who's about tonight
- today's lifts
- the banter
- “on my way”
- the photo from Saturday
Put on the board
- fixtures & results
- decisions and minutes
- how we do things
- registration & fees
- recruitment
- the archive
- what a new member needs in six months
What you get
Everything a community needs to feel at home.
Six things your members and moderators will actually notice, and how each one is done. Each is also a link, because the page asserts and the document argues.
01
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 →
02
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 →
03
Add what you are missing, without the fear
Plugins add the things your community needs and stay in their lane. One that misbehaves fails on its own: the page still renders, the thread still posts, the board carries on as though it had never been installed.
What plugins can do →
04
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 →
05
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 →
06
Whoever runs it is not chained to it
Backups, migrations, member admin, scheduled jobs — everything nobody should have to click through a browser for is one command or one API call, safe to script because it obeys exactly the permissions a person would.
The API and the CLI →
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.
A first deploy: the same four containers on either route. On the guided one, the panel generates the secrets and issues the certificate 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 follows releases.
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.
Documentation
Organised by what you are trying to do.
Four of the references are generated from the code they describe, and one that disagrees with your board fails the build rather than misleading you. Every page is rendered from the Markdown in the repository — there is no second copy to fall behind.
Running a board
From a bare server to a board that has been up long enough to go wrong.
Start with Quickstart →
Advanced deployment
The same board without the panel: the compose file, a reverse proxy you run, and what you take on for it.
Start with Deploying by hand →
Themes
The frozen v1 slot contract, and every slot a theme may fill.
Start with The theme API, v1 →
Plugins
What a plugin may do, how its failures are contained, and every hook it can listen to.
Start with The plugin API, v1 →
The API
Every endpoint, scope and rate limit, generated from the route registry.
Start with REST API v1 →
Migrating from MyBB
Where a Meith board behaves differently from the one you are leaving, and why.
Start with MyBB parity decisions →
Development
Running it on your own machine, the workspace, and the conventions this codebase holds to.
Start with Development →
Give your community somewhere to keep things.
A place of your own, on a machine of your own, in about half an hour. Have a look at a real one first, and read the source before you run it — all of it is there.
- A machine
- Your own, with Docker
- A domain
- Pointed at it
- Everything else
- Comes up beside it