Multisite for small collection of sites for a family?

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I have been running my own personal discourse for a few months, and more and more people in my family are taking interest and wanting to have their own. These folks are not as tech savvy or interested as I am, and I tend to be the one helping them with their tech questions anyway. For almost my entire adult life I’ve been registering domains and maintaining them for various tentacles of my family.

I don’t want to clutter my own discourse and to be honest I have little interest in following most of the discussions some of my relatives would be having with each other… it would be like thanksgiving every day of the year! :turkey: However, I have been thinking maybe I could use the same digital ocean droplet to maintain 3-4 discourses instances, using the same code base and user list but separate domains and categories. Each could have its own moderators, and be able to add and manage access privileges to them, etc. There would be very little activity on each forum.

Is such a thing feasible or reasonably easy to do? Or is there another approach you would recommend that is cost effective and provides sufficient separation between different branches of the family? How close are we really to Category-Specific Moderators, phase 1 RFC?

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You can either set up a multisite instance or run multiple Discourse containers (probably with a single database container). In either case, you’ll need something external to deal with https certs.

Once multisite is set up, it’s not much harder than running a single instance.

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Thanks, Jay! This sounds about right. I already have my server configured with a few other very rarely frequented websites running on it, and they all are running https certs properly. So adding multisite is probably not going to be such a stretch.

This is uncharted territory for me, so any pointers on where to start much appreciated. I will start here: Multisite configuration with Docker. Wish me luck! :four_leaf_clover:

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