i’d say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.

if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don’t need to open up.

if you’ve already got something at home to run it on and want it easy to set up/maintain. take a look at mkdocs.

so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn’t enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?

if you want easy java minecraft i might try something like https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server though i’ve not tested that one beyond ‘it did install’.

for bedrock this walkthough does a good job of covering the steps. https://harrk.dev/dedicated-bedrock-minecraft-server-ubuntu-setup/

microsoft has a habit of changing the download url regularly so automating it gets annoying. my kid has moved onto java so i’ve just left the bedrock server shutdown.

if you really want to run a java server outside docker and you’re comfortable with bash scripts, i can post mine here. but one of the docker builds is going to be the simplest way to get started with it.

authentik is an identity server. theres a couple free ones available, this one just worked for me. it provides oauth and ldap fallback for the jellyfin server. along with login for most of the other servers i host like nextcloud/calibre-web/lychee etc. it has a nice easy log in process along with a ‘homepage’ kinda thing for everything my users can access with their account. makes it easier to support the non technical friends and family.