EDIT: I live in a more rural community (moved from a big city). We have 5-6 small (~50k people) towns, all well connected. Everything happens on Facebook. I would like to move to a different platforms. Plus points for self-hosted, federated.
To get better answers, you need to flesh out all the features of Facebook that your communities are using. E.g. Shared event calendars? Groups? Private Messaging? Video hosting for users to upload vids of community events? Live feeds? Etc.
Look at the left side of navigation topics to help you enumerate and think about it: https://www.facebook.com/help/130979416980121/
Do you expect those ~50k to create new logins for the new platform? Or do they sign in with their existing "Facebook ID" to avoid hassle of new account creation? Do they need a phone app? If it's website only from the smartphone web browser, do you need web push for notifications? Facebook interaction with others has convenient lookup from the phones' contact listing. Web-only site doesn't have straightforward access to smartphone's address book (without PhoneGap). Etc.
If your communities are using a lot of those social networking features, it means trying to use Mastodon as a substitute for Facebook is going to be a very incomplete solution.
Of course, alternative solutions are not going to fully match Facebook but you still need to think of the threshold for a minimum viable feature set so your 50k users won't reject it.
You can build out a million features for Facebook parity, but it doesn't mean much if you have low traction.
There were also cases where a simple Wordpress (or whatever) site would have worked, but the owners went all in on replicating FB features, instead of making sure users actually went to their new property at all.
https://www.joinordiefilm.com/
the goal is to get people to join clubs, so you want some kind of service which has a specific mission and the minimal part is important. You want to put blinders on your users. You don't want them to get served irrelevant ads and notifications. I'd consider this site
https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
which is basically a calendar of events that they host; they have forums but people aren't chewing the fat, they're having discussions that are focused around the events that
https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/
You don't have the horrific moderation problems that come out of "is it fake or not?" or "is this socially acceptable or not?" because the real question is "is this relevant to the events we put on?" in which case the problem of "your free speech is (in my view) your obnoxious behavior" which gets worse the more purposeless a site is.
Normies can use it.
People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Mailing list, Usenet, IRC, are all now dead because no one could invest to UX in these early open protocols.
In theory you can reach all users using a mailing list but oh boy, good luck with that one, unless all of your peers are kernel developers.
Most of us miss the simplicity of mailing lists.
I lived in a new (at the time) neighbourhood back in 2008, and we had a neighbourhood mailing list which was very convenient. Nobody had issues with using it, because there’s very little to learn if you know how ti read and reply emails. Sure, we had to explain “reply to one” vs “reply to all” to a few people, but that’s entirely it.
Mailing lists fell out of fashion because of marketing and trends, not because of any inherent limitations.
Do YOU want to move off of Facebook for some reason, or do people want to move off of Facebook for some reason. MOST people in the US, especially in a rural are are not going to quit an app because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President. You have an uphill battle, and at best you are going to shed a majority of users. Facebook is a popular platform, especially for those 30+ people in a small town that use local groups.
Out of ~30 people, I got precisely 3 people to switch. No one else cared, no one else wanted the hassle of switching. I even got a few comments along the lines of "but no-one I know is on Signal" etc. I ended up re-installing WhatsApp because I decided that the loss of contact with so many people was worse than any privacy worries I had at the time.
Signal takes many seconds to render the main window. Telegram opens in a reasonable amount of time.
Chat bubbles in signal reveal some hidden icons when you hover them, but have a separate right click menu when you click them. You basically have to guess which of both menus contains the action that you need.
Copy paste of images often doesn’t work on Signal. The voice clip button does nothing. It simply doesn’t work, but doesn’t show any errors or log anything.
I want to like Signal, but the clients are simply terrible, have bad UX and are full of bugs.
Signal desktop takes 4 seconds to launch for me. That's a bit slow, but I launch it at boot and leave it open all the time.
I see a ... menu when I hover over messages in a chat; its contents are identical to what I see right-clicking the message.
Copy/paste of images into and out of chats works for me. The voice clip button works for me.
I'd be annoyed if I ran into a bunch of client bugs like these too, but they do sound like bugs rather than bad design. If you haven't used it in a while, they may be fixed.
It’s of course not trivial but one has to wonder if there’s something there.
Us tecchies (typical HN members) literally can't imagine what non-tech people go through, when encountering tech.
It's terrifying, humiliating, and intimidating. The reaction from us techs, does nothing to help, as we tend to sneer at them, and do everything we can, to humiliate them. Fairly typical bullying, but we don't want to admit it, because we were always bullied, and don't want to admit that we are just doing the same to others.
Most folks painfully learn rote, then get terrified of changes. This is why so many folks don't want to upgrade, or add new features. Just learning the ones they have mastered, was difficult enough. They can't deal with doing it on a regular basis (like most of us tecchies do).
Until we accept this, and keep it in mind, when we design solutions, we won't get much traction. People who do understand it, and design for it, tend to make a lot of money.
This is also why we need to introduce changes S L O W L Y, even when we feel that it doesn't make sense.
Basic human empathy. It's kinda rare, these days.
Most people did not, in fact learn how to use computers http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
What might actually be cool would be a common set of design principles that become used across many apps and ecosystems - it would make switching much easier.
People are already used to the little "hamburger menu" three dots thing in UI (can also be three lines) often in the upper right for better or worse
Heck, we see this with Mastodon and Bluesky, their content is very thin in my experience (even if Twitter's is also thinner than it used to be at least with the mostly tech-related content I followed).
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
the unreasonable man.
Thus you must convince users that 1) FB is clearly inferior to your product (e.g. many important hidden demerits) or 2) your product adds something essential that's absent in FB. Otherwise, why switch?
This is kind of a cost-benefit issue though. The benefits of having a local community outweigh the negatives of the platform having its own issues.
If your issues on the platform cause you to ditch it, which ruins your community, than what have you actually done?
I believe when it comes to anything that is not-for-profit, that the path of least resistance the only path. Therefore moving off of Facebook is simply not a consideration.
Very near sighted, but an actual problem government, good governance, has struggled with absolutely. Part of the techno fascism is emerging because people are entirely easily manipulated with todays egg prices and not tomorrows suffering of human rights.
I keep hearing this. What does this mean?
My guess would be "a system in which big technology firms can effectively censor speech with coordination from the state". But I think those that use it mean something else.
Musk — one of the most powerful people in Washington — doing things like throwing a sieg heil salute, supporting the AfD, claiming that "Hitler was a communist,"[1] and calling for the execution of a government witness[2].
Thiel proclaiming to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and then half of Silicon Valley showing up to party with him[3].
Techno fascism is what it says on the tin: technologists who are very happy with fascism for the sake of money and power. (Just don't call them fascists, they hate that.)
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leade...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
If you're looking for a better term, we could call it "technocratic anti-liberalism" to perhaps cover all the bases. People are attempting to describe the current situation in which the wealthiest humans in all of history are supporting an anti-liberal executive by making financial donations to anti-liberal leadership and making changes to their products to further the messages thereof, e.g. broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.
"Wealthy" as in "holding more personal wealth than the bottom half of the US population"; "anti-liberal" as in "espousing and acting in opposition to classical liberal values of consent of the governed and equality under law by denying the validity of elections, attempting to overthrow the US liberal democratic government with force, pardoning foot soldiers found guilty of such an attack, utilizing king-like executive direction to undermine the highest law of the land, avoiding all punishment for his own guilt, and so forth.
That's how I interpret the term.
Today it is "Keir Starmer is a fascist" (Sci-fi writer Charlie Stross), "the local people department is fascist" (BLM supporters), I half expect to hear "Jesus was a fascist" although certainly that accusation is leveled at his followers.
There's something seductive about the imagery in Pink Floyd's The Wall and V is for Vendetta that is evocative of the period. Perhaps today's political systems are on the brink of failure due to inaction the way that the remnants of European aristocracy were. But we're not going to face what we're up against using "thought stopping" terms.
One could make the case that the real problem with "people worried about the price of eggs" is a lack of meaning and that Trump's talk about going to Mars or annexing Greenland addresses that more directly, as do the fantasies of fascism which can elevate ordinary feelings of despair.
Our language is bending as it ever does to help people explain these political shifts—often people who see what's happening but don't have much education on the matters of history, political science, philosophy. Bear in mind that 21% of US adults are illiterate, and far fewer are even equipped to read, say, Thomas Paine.
We need ways of talking about the values that are winning (nationalist theocratic autocracy) and the ones that are not (the open society, secular liberal democracy), and the word "liberalism" in the US has beenn so tarnished, so I think "fascism" today has come to mean "anti-liberal." I'll take what I can get.
As for Musk, I think he's mentally ill, I think he may have what I've got.
> Over 90% of political donations from employees at major tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have gone to Democrats since 2004.
> In 2020, 90% of contributions from the internet industry went to Democrats, while only 9% went to Republicans.
> However, there are signs of a slight shift in recent years:
> In 2024, 15% of donations from employees at major tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta went to Republican causes, up from 5% in 2020 and 8% in 2018.
It sounds like your definition is "a few visible billionaires donated to someone I don't like"
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.
Look, I get it. You have your politics and that's fine. But if you want to win hearts and minds, try another strategy. It's all just so exhausting and people check out.
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes
This is a fact, not a rhetorical device.
Whelp, we know which one is going to win then. An economic benefit now wins the vast majority of the time.
No, most people don't care about having this battle - that's the point. If there's no demonstrable reason to leave (e.g. "former president got banned from major platform, so go to new platform") then the - valid, if personally boring to you - point is: how will you persuade people to leave it?
- No ads.
- Free, even for business-use.
- No algorithm interfering with visibility.
- It's usable by community members who do not have a Facebook account, for whatever reason.
- Allows for more free-form content.
- More choices for content delivery format & notifications (say, email, text message, newsletter links).
Maybe you can come up with some. What would you find to be a convincing argument to switch to a community-owned organization platform instead of Facebook?
Honestly if it really would just need to cover the price of the cheapest hosting you can find and the domain registration a single small-to-medium Adsense ad in the sidebar might generate enough to cover it. I don't know how many impressions/pageviews it takes to generate $20 but it can't be that many.
I run some meetup groups, and still pay for it for now, but the price hikes and other charges they're adding are onerous. I know many groups who have shutdown, and I know of some other players wanting to get in to this space to take over from meetup.com. $10/month to run a smallish group is affordable for a lot of folks. $50/month is not. $300/year is just not worth it to many folks, but... $99/year would be. Meetup seems to be moving in to some weird 'hyper optimize for short term revenue' move, which makes me think they'll be gone or acquired/dismantled in the next 5 years.
Simply put you have to ask the most important questions first, then build an app backwards from that
1) How will it be paid for
2) How will it be moderated.
So, you've already failed number one. You have no means to pay for it.
Then you failed number two. If it gains even a modicum of popularity it will be completely and totally over ran with spam.
The internet is a horrifically hostile place. If you design a product without that in mind you're creating a danger for yourself and for your users. Slap a community site up without thinking about COPPA or GDPR or whatever Californian law and suddenly you'll have problems. Slap a site up without heavy moderation and it will be filled with the most awful porn you can imagine.
It's not about just accepting the way things the way the are, it's avoiding becoming a casualty of the way things are.
There are things you should not try as you can easily deduce that they are not rooted in any reality, e.g. "free" and "no-ads"
I was part of something similar a few years ago at a local makerspace. We were using Meetup.com for a while then someone relatively new suggested we try using Discord instead. There wasn't much of a convincing reason besides "let's try it", so a bit over half of the active people gave it a shot, and everyone else followed since that's where the activity was.
While a few people were initially grumbly over making a new account, there aren't many complaints now that we have bots to help with calendars and a bot to help us monitor equipment.
That is also true of every advance society makes: Most people are happy the way they are. It's an obstacle every innovator and leader faces. Yet somehow, we make changes and advances.
it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned
It might happen again. :)
What gets people engaged is stupid anger. Even stuff I agree with on some fundamental political level, the social media version is just stressed out, to the point of being ineffective and often wrong in detail.
Centralized as driven social media can’t go out of business fast enough.
They may share a technology platform, but they are not the same.
If you have children you'll see social media (#2) is incredibly useful and facilitates greatly in communication. We're much more connected than our parents were thanks to these apps.
I use it for parent stuff and parties. It just does what it supposed to. See pictures of kids (private group). Get birthday invites. Just go to the group. No algorithm or engagement farming. It just works.
And marketplace has been a game changer.
What's better? Simpler to setup and maintain for local businesses or daycares. One daycare used a different app and it was awful. Janky, weird, missing features and the teachers complain about it.
Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.
Of course it's debatable because reality can be measured in multiple dimensions.
Is it faster, yes. Is filtering out the massive amounts of bullshit communications easier? Not really, especially with content aware spambots than can be ran by the millions. It's easy to get crushed by bullshit asymmetry. For me this makes most communications less effective because I have to spend even more time figuring out the actual poster and their motivations.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...
It's important to note that Jadav didn't get other people to change and join his crusade before it happened. He merely went out and did what he wanted. People were inspired by seeing it happen.
People aren't going to be inspired by yet another social network touting federation and other technical mumbo-jumbo, because it doesn't help them do anything they weren't already doing on Facebook.
This whole conversation is very strange to me indeed.
Because you’re not engaging with the point?
For starters, the original claim was to “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Beyond that, the point of my reply was to show that it is indeed possible to make the world better without communicating with anyone else (contrary to the original claim).
Anything else is your own addition.
And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.
If you use a platform nobody uses to try and change the world you won't change it just like if you tried to plant trees without using seeds.
Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.
The whole thread is about limited and well-defined communities, not the world. What the OP wants is specifically “isolated”.
> like planting some seeds
Spending thirty years planting a 550 hectare forest and restoring wildlife to it is not “planting some seeds”. Please don’t be reductive.
> Real change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Change is change. You don’t get to define someone’s life work, which was more meaningful and impactful than most of us will ever achieve, not “real” to fit your narrow definition.
If we were discussing everyone who has lived and will ever live, the current population of the world would be a limited snapshot. Same if we were discussing every planet and civilisation in the fictional world of Start Trek.
But we’re not discussing that. Making up something we’re not talking about to attack what we are is called a straw man argument.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781581
What you’re arguing against is not the point I was making. My point in this thread is way up there: it replies to someone saying you cannot make the world better without communicating with other humans, by presenting someone who on their own improved the world more than most (if not all) Facebook groups ever will.
When I used the word “limited”, it was clearly in reference to it being an “isolated” specific community and not everyone.
I don’t think it’s worth either of our times to continue, though. We’ve strayed too much from the original point.
A good evening (or your equivalent time of day) to you.
A better world is subjective.
Yeah, obviously. So part of the OP's task will be selling their communities on why switching away from Facebook is a good thing. Given everything that's going on, now is a good opportunity to do that. But before they can do that, they need to know what to switch to, which is the topic of this thread.
"Engaging in political censorship of their platform in favour of the President" is a little more than being "friendly".
Free Speech in the US is dying. Ignore it at your own peril.
It will be years before these people realize how much the media was controlled from 2020-2024 specifically in favor of one political party. For a lot of people this was the first time it was extremely obvious and going back to Bush and Obama social media and the internet in general weren't considered "serious" political campaign locations. I certainly dont remember either Bush's or Obama's election being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis. Of course there was vitriol but it was so tame compared to today.
Do you mean the party who just used the inauguration to have a senior government member throw nazi salutes? The party whose presidents first actions included pardoning dozens of members of fascist groups?
You can't really be choosing this moment to complain about calling these people nazis??
And that paragraph would not be objectionable to many people in that political grouping.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...
Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. You can set up your own site and set up your own servers if need be. People have been getting their ideas out there before social media and even when the mainstream media wouldn’t cover them.
That’s how the civil rights movement came to prominence.
That was a reasonable stance historically. Only the government had real power to control speech.
Now a tiny number of platforms have a huge amount of power. They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication.
You use personal outreach and then you build up from there. There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc
Which are now largely dependent on social media and the like to reach people.
Church's somewhat less so because they do have services that people physically go to. Most campaign and advocacy groups work online, and for some social media is their main focus. They have to go where people are.
Absolute bullshit. It has never been easier in history to publish your own thoughts for the consumption of anyone who is interested in reading them. You can make your own website and put just about whatever you want on it. You can write and publish pamphlets or books with print on demand services. You can record audio or video with your phone and put it on your website or just send it directly to people. You can walk down to the town square and say pretty much whatever you want.
You absolutely don't need to be on Facebook or Twitter or ANY social networks to exercise your free speech. None of these companies has power over any means of communication other than their own platforms. You don't have to use their platforms.
Yes, but you can reach far fewer people if you do not.
This is well on the way to arguing that you are free to say what you want in a sealed room.
Your argument seems to be that the New York Times has no choice but to publish my op-ed, because otherwise how will anyone find it?
The NYT is a publication, social media are platforms.
You have to put in the work. Major changes happen by people getting thier voice out before social media
But they did not have to compete with social media. There are more third spaces (as is often discussed on HN) and local ways to get started.
So long as you do it in a sound proofed room.
> While users who type "#Democrat" or "#Democrats" see no results, the hashtag "Republican" returns 3.3 million posts on the social media platform.
> By manually searching Instagram for "Democrats", rather than clicking on a hashtag, users are greeted by a screen reading "we've hidden these results".
> "Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content," it says.
For me personally, the only features that remain at all interesting on Facebook are Marketplace, Groups and maybe Events. Does anyone still use Craigslist? It was always terrible so I don't know if there is an alternative for Marketplace but Groups and Events aren't even done that well on Facebook so that seems like a reasonable place to start as far as an MVP.
Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?
Agreed. Also not everyone realizes WhatsApp and IG are also part of Facebook. Aside from elderly folks, almost now one I know uses traditional facebook. However, almost all Millenials and GenZ I know use IG. Practically everyone I know who has overseas family/friends uses WhatsApp.
Also see https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... just for kicks :)
maybe i sound like i'm wearing a tin hat but i don't totally trust their active user numbers or believe that facebook is growing active users in the US. like am i in there bc i have a facebook acct from years ago to run ads and accidentally clicked a fb link once last year? what if i viewed a facebook ad. at some point somebody is deciding what counts as active and i'd bet a dollar that person is incentivized for numbers to be big and monotonic.
in my experience it's good to poke at numbers that don't match your intuition. that's how you get to reality.
i know your example was farcical, but if you know a lot of people and 100% of them play racquetball, you should seriously question someone who is telling you that football is actually the most popular sport, especially if they have economic incentives for you thinking that's the truth. it's just math.
it is not their numbers :)
i have a facebook acct from years ago to run ads and accidentally clicked a fb link once last year?
you won't count
in my experience it's good to poke at numbers that don't match your intuition. that's how you get to reality.
except what you are doing is not looking at numbers but drawing from either your personal experiences or "oh, I've heard no one is on facebook these days"
always follow the money - investors would RUN FOR THE HILLS if Facebook was what you are thinking Facebook is. maybe this will be different in 10+ years when boomers die off and GenZ, GenA are in their "prime" but at this point Facebook is the ruler of social media
I can’t fault for someone making the attempt for whatever reason but if the reason is tied to politics I think that it will fail. People ultimately attempting a platform shift for political reasons like this will find that most people are 1) simply not as dogmatic politically as the activist types that would propose a change like this even if they are “on the same team” and 2) people are unwilling to leave a system of comfort for a novel system that works even slightly differently to their comfort zone to essentially do the same thing.
OP didn't give say politics had anything to do with it. Let them nerd up if they want to.
Centralization around specific platforms has plusses and minuses. Having alternatives drives innovation.
I disagree, GP's comment is typical of HN. The discussions you've mentioned do happen frequently, but surely you've noticed that at least half the comments (and often the top rated ones) will inevitably be "it can't be done so why even try".
This is just my anecdotal experience, overwhelming anecdotal data, and I won't mention the specific regions so as to maintain my respect for those regions by not "out"ing them for having their views.
So: my advice is to not think of it as all-or-nothing. You will not be able to move 300k people off of Facebook overnight. This is somewhat akin to every IT migration project ever: it always takes longer than you think, and is not always a linear process from "fewer people migrated" to "more people migrated".
It's also akin to community organizing: there is no substitute for actually talking to people about it, especially in the initial phases. Or: high-touch sales, where you may initially need to spend a lot of energy and time per person successfully moved over. The other common thing here is that you will hear "no" a lot, which is a valuable experience anyways (but will be frustrating).
Also: unfortunately, no one will care if it's self-hosted or federated, outside of niche tech circles. They will care about whether they can reach the people they want to reach, and whether the user experience is good or not. This is reality: talking about these points will not help you.
Some things you'll probably need to do:
- Identify a single credible alternative platform. - Identify specific groups of people who are willing to be early "de-adopters". For instance: a local youth group, a sports club, whatever. Ideally you are a part of this group already; you then have a much better chance. Businesses will likely say no, so you want community groups. - Within those groups, identify champions: people who care about the same thing you care about, and are willing to commit time and effort to help. - Together with your champions, build a toolkit that allows you to scale up your efforts. This may be guides on how to talk to people about the change - what works, what doesn't. This might be instructions for setting up a specific platform. It might be communications channels, leaflets / flyers for putting up in public places, whatever.
which is very much about community organizing but it has an aura of "people spreading rumors about bicycle thefts at the movie theater downtown (why don't they call the cops?)", the woman who radiates creepy signs of precarity (is cleaning up and looking for the phone number of the people who are suspected to run an illegal landfill) and then posts screen shots of the creepy come-ons she gets from guys who want to be her sugar daddy, etc.
Maybe there's a space for a platform that specifically targets small, community, in person kinds of organizations, maybe even targeted to a particular geographical area; something like Meetup but just a little less structured.
Here's a fair sized local organization (has more than one run a month) that has a good site
https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
But making that scalable is tricky; somebody in the club's leadership is a Wordpress pro. $5 a month would be cheap, but people are niggardly. If you're a web tech native owning a domain name is table stakes, but I think you'd lose 80% of "normies" even the phone-dependent "internet natives" if they had to get a domain name. There is a certain amount of panic over the breakdown of community organizations, see the line of research described in this film
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/join_or_die
and rather than getting $5 a month out of people who think they can't afford it, getting funding from somebody like the United Way (for a particular area) or the Knight Foundation might be a better idea.
Nextdoor dot com is actually even more toxic than a lot of Facebook is and I would avoid at all costs.
I wouldn't mind ads but I'd want to see ads of the old-school sponsorship variety (the running club could see ads for the local running shoe store, one of the local grocery stores, an overfunded non-profit like the United Way, etc.) as opposed to the auction-based, personalized ads that you'd see on reddit. Similarly if a sidebar on the running club had a link to a local board game or ham radio club I'd think that's OK but the mission on my mind is to get people to join the ham radio club where they're going to do comms for the running club, not to maximize time on site.
So what happens on Nextdoor is that there's sort of a vicious cycle where normal people show up, get grossed out by the toxic ones and leave.
Whether they'd be receptive to share their secret sauce and let a thousand Front Porches bloom is another question though, guess you could ask them! :)
Pay for it with ads from local businesses, and give it away for free at all those stores. Get your regional Chamber of Commerce to help set you up with connections and sales channels.
At first, I thought it was a little bit silly to start a print magazine in 2020, but honestly, it's amazing and everyone loves it. I look forward to each new edition. And they become hard to find cause people grab them so quickly!
Huge hit, highly recommend. But remember: it's a huge hit not because it's a print magazine; it's a hit because the execution of the couple that manage it. They're top-notch, and it's a "hobby" for them, not their main jobs.
Because it has an editor (and you could break the work up amongst a few people) you don't have the same problems that listservs have (spam) or nextdoor (gossip and paranoia).
Substack or mailchimp would be fine for v1.
If you don't want to distribute something on paper or cover any costs, this is a fine place to start.
I use to love these artsy free papers but even my elderly parents don't read the local newspaper anymore that grew up reading the paper.
The local paper is a very small niche item at this point.
The only way I can think to do this is to hang old school flyers in an area of the city/town that attracts the people you want in your community.
Organise the newspaper on the new platform, advertise it on both.
If all the complainers have to move to the new platform to complain, or chat about it adjacent to you thats where they will end up.
This is a hard problem because people expect real-time chat, videoconferencing, livestreaming, privacy controls, proper notifications, profiles, photo uploads and much more.
I have spent over a decade building essentially an open-source Facebook that can federate in more interesting ways than Mastodon, and can support Matrix protocol and much more etc. It has all those features I mentioned out of the box, and is completely open-source.
Short answer, watch this:
Or just look at these PDFs:
https://qbix.com/community.pdf
Longer answer, read this: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
We use it to serve our own local communities:
Here is the code: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Or if you want, contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com and I can help set it up for you.
Never had the opportunity to test it, but it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft as an alternative to facebook for community/event organization. Might fit the bill for you.
that will drain users from Facebook instantly! i can already see the flood of people coming. /s
This is enough to tell me it's not gonna be suitable.
Their software are all absolutely awful because their organization follows the skewed principle that FOSS is enough to "sell" and they don't take UX into consideration at all.
Literally none of their alternatives are successful, always for this reason.
Their use of good old fashioned www links and SMS messages makes it easy for everyone to share and join events. No app and no Partiful account necessary.
They also have simple and good event privacy model, group scheduling, reminders, Venmo based ticket system, and group chat.
It’s taken over almost completely in my social circles and I’m all for it.
It seems like they might have group organizing features now, but I'd be concerned about adopting it for a group without a clear idea of how they're going to make money
> Partiful does not make money yet. They are a venture-backed startup with many millions of dollars of funding. They will eventually offer a premium version, an ad-supported model, or be acquired by a larger company like Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Snapchat, or one of these other potential acquirers.
Basically, enjoy it while you can. There is nothing wrong with using a free service like this while you can. Best case IMO is that they monetize it with low fees and have a product that is actually worth paying for.
I've never used Facebook for anything, but the above four tools work very well for us.
The point seems to be that you can pick whatever service you want and will still get the information because it’s repeated across channels. The manager needs to post to all four, but everyone else picks one.
The email list is probably the single most important part of the tech stack actually.
When they eventually get tired of managing all this, they will eventually need to hand the reigns off to someone else. Hopefully someone will step up, because if someone doesn't it won't matter if the group is in 4 places or one.
Decidim is a political social network that allows communities to have a free technology, with democratic guarantees and designed for the common good. While this technology can be installed with knowledge of Ruby on Rails and some knowledge of servers, so perfectly self-hosted, there are also organisations that offer it in SaaS format at a very competitive price. Also, you can federated differents Decidims:)
* Look into hosting a forum (e.g. phpBB). Forums are excellent because they don't lose old information like facebook does. When someone says "Hey what's the policy on dogs?" three years later I can search "dogs" and find the answer. Downside: They're not pretty, not full of pictures and no infinite scrollingz. sadge alfababies. Kidding aside, if you do try a forum, be sure to not offer a bunch of niche subtopics. The more subtopics the more stale the forum feels overall. Just stick to one main topic until someone asks for a second.
* IRC chat. I hosted an IRC group for several years at work and it worked great. We only killed it when we decided to move to an enterprise communication app.
It would be cool if they had a scraper that could pre-populate the system with some content from Facebook.
"Generate a quick (salacious|funny|sad) story involving (random group member) and (random object) happening at (randomly selected location)."
I have no idea how it makes money, which is sadly worrying these days...
Loomio - this is usually for coops, especially decision making, but last I checked works well as a forum.
Lemmy - federated reddit alternative.
Discourse - the forum we know and love.
Flarum - decent alternative to discourse.
The challenge with all these is moderation: Lemmy solves it best by having subreddit style division of labour, with moderation per "board". Discourse supports trusted users if memory serves, and I'm not sure about the others.
I'm pretty sure discourse and Lemmy also support eg, log in with google/facebook/etc which eases onboarding a lot.
Personally, I'd go with Lemmy. It is less mature than discourse but probably more suited to your purposes.
What does that mean? I think we need a lot more context on what you want to do. Are you the IT administrator for the county and want to find alternative ways of disseminating announcements? Or are you just a citizen that wants people to chat somewhere else?
-most of what you need is basically something similar to Facebook Groups (nowadays, I bookmark Facebook Groups for the 3 groups I follow, and skip the main feed, which is basically all ads and random memes these days)
-you need a platform with mass adoption - FB got it w/ free accounts back in the day, connecting old classmates or whatnot. So a new platform would need to be free for average users
-simple signup - single "Server" - i.e. can't have the weaknesses of individual forum server software or even mastodon/federated solutions (not enough users, hard to setup)
-some way to monetize - i.e. the sins of Facebook can be traced (in part) to reliance on ads to monetize. so maybe charge for admins who want to set up their own group? It would be be an order of magnitude less income than Facebook but maybe sustainable if you keep the scope of such a site/service small.
The younger gen these days use a lot of discord, older gen uses slack, but the way they are set up with individual "servers" seems clunky to me, and no web interface but it's relatively close.
You may be able to get away with the free tier of Slack.
The success of newer social platforms like Discord is mostly people creating new groups there, rather than wholesale migrations. Facebook itself followed that pattern in earlier days.
That said, your main point is solid.
If you just want a discussion board, Discourse is self-hostable and people might be familiar with it from other companies. I’d argue it’s not a very normie-friendly platform however and out of the box, I find the notification defaults quite annoying. Maybe admins can change that, but most of the communities that I’m a part of do not.
This is like the hobbyist version of resume driven development.
But the better question is, what is the purpose of getting off of Facebook? Are the users asking for it?
Especially now that Zuck has kissed the ring, conservatives (ie rural small town folks) are not trying to flee Facebook now if they ever were.
The downside is that to get more of a Facebook community experience with a calendar, files, and subgroups, you will probably have to pay for for the Premium level. https://groups.io/static/pricing
This person made the mistake they did because of their social isolation and the probation officer is entirely supportive of his developing more face-to-face connection, but he finds it frustrating to find a poster for something like a board game club which has nothing but a QR code that points to a Facebook page.
v4 now fully federates, has always been self-hostable, and is a great piece of software for migrating from Facebook.
Consider the "feed" plugin for a less jarring experience. Push notifications via the "web-push" plugin.
You can check it out at https://dateit.com/ I’d be happy to offer you and maybe some others here free access to our premium features so you can experience everything the app has to offer. Just create an account and email me at rob@dateit.com and mention this post.
Anyone have bright new ideas on this angle?
In the UK at least, a recent ofcom ( Communications regulator ) report suggested that 76% of people reported using WhatsApp in the previous 3 months.
This is close enough to the 83% of people who reported making a phone call in the past 3 months that you can consider "everyone" to have WhatsApp in the same way you'd consider everyone can make phone calls. Yes, there are notable exceptions you may have to accommodate for or be prepared for if necessary, but you can by default assume everyone has it on their phone.
If OP's objection is to Meta, then of course don't use WhatsApp. But if the objection is Facebook as a platform then a message group may be suitable.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/internet-based-services/technology/...
Facebook is used for a lot of notification/scheduling at my local game store though. I refuse to use Facebook, but don't want to be a burden on everyone else. I found some people I like and gave them my phone number and told them I'm down for a game whenever they are. Although rare, I have gotten a text before and gone and had fun.
Communities are made of people, do you think they'd be willing to move?
I think you'd have to go through and make sure you know exactly what to tell them to install/configure for each of the following scenarios:
* Willing to install an iOS app.
* Willing to install an Android app.
* Willing to create an account in a Web site, and want to get email when someone in the group says something (with a hashtag or whatever).
Also see whether they're willing to talk on Fediverse, or they want something less public.
It's built around managing a community, from the perspective of the community manager or head of community. It harnesses the power of hosts, the people who actually make the events happen and captures the free energy in the system of human to human community.
I actually think for your use case it would be perfect. In each town you can crowd source (or directly invite the facebook group admins as hosts) hosts to create events and then run them. The platform started from creating and scaling the All-In Podcast community and now have worked with Tim Ferris, Blueprint/Don't Die, and next week all the events for Utah Tech Week https://app.getriver.io/utahtechweek
There's a content creator I follow that proudly moved from Youtube to their own Peertube instance. Even though I like their content, I never run into it anymore. Every couple months I think "oh yeah, I should check on them" and manually navigate to their Peertube instance and watch half a video.
Make sure you aren't dooming the community.
This divisiveness hurts across the world, but is painful when it goes local. These are people you see at the grocery store or teachers who can retaliate against your kids.
We just launched a hateless social media platform. People can speak freely on any topic, including politics. But a clever combination of aliases, real names, and respect functionality kills off the nastiness.
If any of this rings true to you, I'd love to help.
Mike Schoeffler https://hiweave.com/
> Do people post online because they care about the cause, or just want to look woke? Respond -Hot topic
and
> The guy might be on the spectrum, but he has a good sense of humor. [Link to Elon Musk post about Nazi salute]
I suppose it's possible I just got unlucky, but this doesn't seem to be avoiding the standard pitfalls of social media.
The "hot topic" thing is just chatgpt creating conversation starters. Sometimes, its' leaning left, sometimes right, sometimes it's not political. We're tuning it up (mainly to just be more engaging).
The post you saw about Elon Musk ... Everyone is talking about whatever they feel like talking about. If Musk isn't your cup of tea, mute this anonymous person and you don't see each other for a week. It's only a week because maybe one of you was having a bad day. But with repeated muting, they're completely gone. Also nudges the system to group you with people you're going to like better. After enough respects and mutes, you should see the people you enjoy.
The bigger point is what happens once you bring your friends. You guys can talk about anything without getting angry at each other. If they irritate, mute 'em. If you enjoy the conversation, respect them. Enough mutual respect and you can see real names.
Succesful local communities always utilize more platforms - meaning they are cross posting on something like Facebook, Instagram, their own website, and sometimes other sites. Can also help to have a WhatsApp group chat
Other local communities specific apps I have seen successfully used:
Meetup.com (been around for awhile and seems lesser used) Heylo Circle (not the crypto)
I've never used this before but you can try:
2i2wbyza4 at mozmail dot com
Or suggest a contact method.
In Vermont, there are mailing lists for every town that are widely used, https://vitalcommunities.org/community-discussion-lists/ and also Front Porch Forum https://frontporchforum.com/. I guess the latter is pretty much what you are talking about, a community social network that is not Facebook or Nextdoor and not trying to become a megacorp.
There is still a lot of facebook groups for many small towns, but its easy enough to totally ignore and just use noticeboards, ask/talk to real people, etc if you want.
Now they're asking members to sign up (and pay) for more feature (meetup plus). and show ads. But still decent for organizing meetings.
One alternative is an old-school email list. We have one run by a single older woman, who refuses any form of updates or help. If she’s sick, emails don’t go out. If you want to sign up, you need to ask her. Still, it’s easy for people to use on a variety of platforms, uses minimal data, doesn’t have any tracking, and doesn’t have ads. The longer-form, slower nature of email makes it less likely to devolve into drama like the local Facebook groups do.
Even if you do self-host something decentralized, you need it to be reliable without you. If you succeed and your community relies on it, you’re doing them a disservice by not making it a reliable even if your circumstances change.
It federates with Mastodon and co.
Some statistics: https://fedidb.org/software/friendica
When I do, I would start with a website/blog, probably using Ghost. Good community starts with good communication. Comments are just fine for initial community building. Once you have some traction, consider a forum.
Also, look into Front Porch Forum, they've been doing it their own way for years, it can work.
For your bonus criteria email can be self hosted but that's a more complicated topic as it pertains to mailing lists. At least a couple people in your community should be at list technical enough to follow internet examples. Mailing lists are federated per the spirit of the definition as they can each use their own existing email provider.
Google+ "failed" (for various definitions thereof) and while it had numerous failures of its own I wonder how much critical mass it failed to achieve because Facebook was hijacking the sharing of it
Like they hijacked email addresses, to make it hard to move them to another social network https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Community building would probably be way more efficient if done in person. That would make getting to know each other way easier. It would allow 'water fountain' type of interactions; which you usually don't have online.
So, my 2 cents would be to find a park, or something else public (weather permitting) and gather there. It could also bring passerbys to get curious and gather more people.
Not everything has to have a technological solution. In-person interactions should be more important for community building.
If you're serious about this, then you need to ask yourself (as dispassionately as possible) why you think this should happen. What benefits are you trying to provide, what shortcomings are trying to bridge. Then validate with your community that these are actually problems they even want addressed, and if so how badly do they want it. Then search for alternatives that explicitly accomplish that.
Maybe that is something that works for you as well if everybody is already connected. It is completely login-less but does only provide event planning features, maybe you need more…(?)
Disclaimer: my site
https://framalibre.org/ (it's french only, sorry)
Good luck!
You pay once, self-host, and get unlimited users.
You would have the hosting expenses, but that's nowhere near what a SaaS product would require you to spend.
It's early alpha - here's the story behind it:
Let me know if this is what you're after and you want some help setting up an instance.
Still, I would like to find something that does text, email, and basic group features like calendar and photos
Network effect is always the party pooper. If everyone's using Facebook it's unlikely they'll want to switch to anything else.
I applaud and encourage your chutzpah, but I’m not too optimistic about your prospects. Do you want to move your community out of Facebook, or does the community want to do it? Do they even agree with your reasons for wanting to move, or is it possible they actually agree with Zuckerberg and voted for Trump?
Remember you only have one shot. With that large of a group, you’ll find people with all levels of skill, patience, and ideology. If your solution isn’t immediately better (not equal; better) than Facebook, you already lost. It doesn’t need to be better at everything, but it does need to be better at the most important and most used features. And make sure you believe in the cause enough to be the goto person for every question.
Make a list of what the platform needs to support and do and come back with that. Then test, test, test. You won’t succeed if you rush, people move slowly.
Best of luck to you.
That is not true at all. Trying, failing, and trying again are part of any change or innovation. In fact, it's close to the truth that nobody succeeds the first time.
“Innovation” doesn’t matter at all here, that’s not in question in the slightest, you’re conflating concepts. I’m giving specific advice, not making a general statement.
That's not actually how it works. People try time and again, sometimes over decades or centuries, before achieving change - or achieving anything at all.
One thing you do by trying and failing repeatedly is that you normalize your presence and legitimize your cause, and demonstrate that you won't be dismissed or deterred. People begin to take you more seriously.
Of course they will laugh at you and ridicule you at first. That just means you have left the starting gate.
Yes, it is. And your next sentence demonstrates how you’re still missing the point.
> People try time and again, sometimes over decades or centuries, before achieving change - or achieving anything at all.
Do you think OP has decades or centuries to move their community out of Facebook? That is patently absurd.
Again, I’m offering specific advice. Specific, as in to this situation, not making a general point.
I agree with you on the broad philosophical level, but that is absolutely useless advice for this situation. Good advice for the macro doesn’t always apply on the micro. Don’t get blinded by ideology, this thread is about solving OP’s specific problem.
> Of course they will laugh at you and ridicule you at first. That just means you have left the starting gate.
People like to believe that “if they’re making fun of you, you’re doing something important to change the world”. That is not necessarily true. Many ideas are ridiculed and do turn out to be wrong and stupid. Like alchemy or NFTs. There are many more ridiculed bad ideas than ridiculed good ideas, the only reason you know more of the latter than the former is that the bad ideas everyone thought were bad are quickly forgotten, and the others are remembered because it makes a good story. It’s survivorship bias.
What sort of features are you looking for in a community platform?
Im in the same situation, in my rural area everything happens through local facebook groups. If you are not there, you will not get party invitations , voice calls etc
Set it up.
Send the URL to your neighbors.
See who joins. Might take off, might (probably) not. But seems to me that's basically it.
Community building on that platform seems like it'd be really difficult with it's current atmosphere.
Example: mightynetworks.com
Good luck, because most people use there cell phones now days and a lot of sw like those listed are just not meant for that format.
Forums:
phpBB - phpbb.com SMF - simplemachines.org MyBB - mybb.com bbPress - bbpress.org XMB - xmbforum2.com Flarum - flarum.org ElkArte - elkarte.net FUDforum - fudforum.org miniBB - minibb.com TidyBB - tidybb.co.uk Flatboard - flatboard.org
Social Networking:
pH7Builder - ph7builder.com Jcow - jcow.net Open Source Social Network - opensource-socialnetwork.org HumHub - humhub.org Family Connections - familycms.com Elgg 6 - elgg.org
Also, door to door salesmen don't tend to go to rural areas.
