>move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution
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.
I've seen projects go off the rails trying to replicate Facebook's features for their groups, so make sure that your minimum actually means minimum in your MVP.
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.
More to the point, if, like Robert Putnam, you believe that the nation is on the verge of a civic crisis because of the breakdown of local organizations
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.
The best feature of FB is reach. You can't replicate that without a global social media platform. So don't. Just build local communities that thrive _despite_ the fact they are started on FB. More in-person social interaction might upend FB and social media, but we currently play this game so these are the rules we must follow.
It's reach and UX.
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.
Mastodon is a Twitter clone, nowhere comparable to Facebook. An endless microblogging format may not be ideal for a local community, as compared to a regular forum (which is just one of the many features Facebook offers).
This is such a great answer. You've given me flashbacks to many zoom meetings that started with "Can't we just...".
> 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.
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.
This. After WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook (this predates any of the current political stuff, it was entirely about privacy), I tried to get friends and family to switch to something else -- Signal in fact as iMessage was a no-go because of the lack of Android support.
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.
I managed to get people over to Telegram. Signal was a no go. It’s still a bit inconvenient. Mobile only unless you link a desktop is a non starter for me period. Majority of people don’t care about e2ee. They want an easy to use app that syncs everything and doesn’t require reading a manual.
I actually started with Telegram, then there was some "don't the bad guys use that?" so Signal it was ...
Sad you got downvoted. Signal UX is 100x worse than Telegram and I probably can calculate it to prove this exact number. I’m dreaming about Telegram client and Signal-like openness.
I have often wondered why nobody takes the open source clients for Telegram and experiments with swapping the backend, so to speak.
It’s of course not trivial but one has to wonder if there’s something there.
I have used both Signal and Telegram for years and I'm not seeing much UX difference. What's better for you on Telegram?
I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.
You won't get folks to move, because people tend to "stay stuck."
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.
I had hoped the generations that grew up with the internet would learn how to use computers. Technical advantages like encryption and social advantages like federation tend to make things more complicated to use no matter how much effort is put into UX.
Most people did not, in fact learn how to use computers http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
Agreed
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
Yeah, my gut is that of those 30K people on Facebook you might get a few hundred to join a new platform. But maybe not. It probably won't be very useful without the other 29K people plus (even if a lot of those are probably not very active).
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).
You're correct, but this is quite a boring response. If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. It is an uphill battle, but I wish the OP luck all the same.
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.
> If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better.
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.
you're arguing local, short term benefits with global long term damage.
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.
> techno fascism
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.
I think "techno fascism" is a term people are using to describe tech company CEOs operating as unelected oligarchs embedded within the new US government.
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.
Just leaving this there:
> 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.
Elon Musk is actively supporting AfD, the current far-right nationalist German party whose members have been caught sharing Nazi memes on Facebook with one another and, well, just read about them. He interviewed their leader on X in which the two of them agreed to rewrite history by saying Hitler wasn't far-right and was a communist. He wrote an op-ed in support of them. He stood behind a podium with the Seal of the President of the United States on it and did a Nazi salute two times in a row.
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes
This is a fact, not a rhetorical device.
I'd say categorically that fascism is not a helpful term to describe movements outside the 1900-1945 period in Europe. (e.g. Japan's movement was anti-colonial if anything, Tokugawa Japan would have been happy to be left alone to gaze its navel, if that wasn't possible it wanted the asia-pacific region as a buffer zone)
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.
I agree with you about trying to avoid thought stopping terms, and the desire for more specific language in important topics. It's tempting to think that history repeats itself, but it doesn't. It really doesn't. Historians will find ways of comparing and contrasting one moment with another, but whatever is happening right now is not determined by any historical law playing out.
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.
Elon Musk did a Nazi salute, live on stage, twice
They told General McArthur when he was getting a tickertape parade to never hold his hand higher than heart level otherwise people would accuse him of making a Nazi salute.
As for Musk, I think he's mentally ill, I think he may have what I've got.
If that's austism, I know several severely austistic people and am diagnosed autistic myself and absolutely none of us have done what can only possibly be described as a Seig Heil. I refuse to believe it was accident.
Autism isn't a mental illness, it's also a fad like gluten intolerance if you are self-diagnosed.
That said, I've seen autists take a spaz and go off on an anti-semitic rant that they didn't really mean.
Big tech leadership cheerily cozying up to an authoritarian president, felon, and rapist who started an insurrection and literally tried to overthrow the last election.
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...
A lot of really smart people in the 1930's were also really into eugenics and forced sterilization and so on. Hitler had a lot of support, even in the US, for what he was doing openly. Being smart doesn't prevent you from being an asshole. Only being empathetic does, and you don't have to be smart to be empathetic.
>you're arguing local, short term benefits
Whelp, we know which one is going to win then. An economic benefit now wins the vast majority of the time.
Yes, local maximums are deceptive and should be pointed at as often as possible
Facebook is where his community is, and it's good enough for them. Why would anyone move? What possible hope does he have of overcoming the network effect and convincing people to move to something they don't know? (And is most likely - for their use case - a worse experience)
Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.
> Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle
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?
Good question, let's try to answer it. Suppose OP believes they have a serviceable replacement in place. What arguments could they use to convince their communities to switch to it? Here's some ideas:
- 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?
Who pays for it?
I'd suspect the 'free' and 'no ads' would be somewhat mutually exclusive. Perhaps a particular group organizer pays a modest amount - $19/year(?) - to manage/moderate groups up to X000 members.
Which means it isn't free, it's a charity project paid for by the group organizer(s). That's probably fine in the short term, maybe even longer, but eventually the organizer(s) will move out of the area, or get tired of managing the group, or die, or whatever, and someone will need to manage it.
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.
Hello, it appears you've never even ran the most basic internet platform before in your life.
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.
I agree it's unlikely to succeed, but I find thinking about our problems and trying to fix them much more admirable & interesting than just rolling over and accepting things as they are. You can't improve things if you never even try.
The important issue in thinking about problems is understanding all the interconnected problems.
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.
These aphorisms also don't improve things. There are actual barriers to trying something; if your suggestion doesn't clear them then yes, it's no point trying that suggestion.
You can't improve things if you never even try.
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"
Signal not existing at all proves your point i guess.
Most people don't care about the platform that's used if there's enough buy-in.
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.
> most people don't care about having this battle
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 doesn’t matter what the poster believes. He is doing something for the benefit of a community that doesn’t care about whatever ideological battle he is trying to fight and inconveniencing them in the process
Fine, let’s nobody do anything and convince nobody of nothing. Sit on couch, watch telly, mind own business. Great life!
Doing something personally is fine. But trying to convince an entire community to ditch something that works and is likely incredibly valuable to them to stick it to some billionaire you don't like is just wrong.
its not wrong - we should all ditch facebook
it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned
We all helped our families and loved ones to ditch MSN for Google Talk for Skype for WhatsApp for Discord etc.
It might happen again. :)
You're being sarcastic when you're implying that any of those switches were worth it, right?
There are a lot of justified, boring reasons to not do something. I despise Facebook, but I'm also not going to waste my time trying to convince my cohorts to use a self-hosted federated alternative. You have to be blindly foolish to even hold out the slightest hope that these people will use an alternative, and I say that as a Mastodon user/apologist.
Many of us are insane in this way. Deride us as blind and foolish.
Okay.
It’s a Quixotic quest. Moving an online community off Facebook isn’t changing the world for the better or worse. It’s inconsequential unless you build an objectively better community. Just switching from Coke to Pepsi isn’t a wasted effort. Focus on zero to one, not zero to another version of zero.
It increases privacy (depending on the new platform), and reduces exposure to whatever toxic stuff is on FB.
Nobody is talking about "making the world a better place," we're talking about a few Facebook groups using a different app instead (and approximately 100% of those people will still be on Facebook doing other things).
Incremental change is also a thing
I wish them luck too! But you have to be realistic and understand your users. Their value are not necessarily your values. A new services must be clearly better for them to switch; just being "not Facebook" is not that compelling to the average person.
If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.
We could communicate more effectively 20 or so years ago. Communication technology had already matured, but we didn’t have these engagement-driven social media platforms. The goal of these platforms isn’t to communicate, it is to sell ads and pick engaging posts to re-broadcast.
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.
I think you're mixing a few things here. There's social media (TikTok, Instagram, X, viral crap) and then there's social media (organize parties, facebook marketplace, Whatsapp, etc).
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.
Facebook is rapidly moving away from effective communication. AI slop, AI posters, and algorithmic preferences for decisiveness over local community with engagement farming algorithms. If the communication medium you use is turning toxic, it’s imperative to find alternatives before communication breaks down and a switch becomes impossible.
Do you use it for #2?
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.
Sure, but if nobody is on the platform or other end of the line, who cares?
Communication was more effective 20 years ago? I remember using a Skypager when I was a Reuters journalist. I also remember processing film in bathrooms at news events then having to scan negatives using a suitcase-sized scanner and computer and it being 30-60 minutes to get photos onto the wire. Now it’s instant.
Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.
>Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago
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.
Tell that to Jadav Payeng, who planted a forest by himself. He accomplished, on his own, more for the good of the world than most communities on Facebook ever will.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...
Rural Facebook communities aren't trying to change the world. They're there for light conversation, gossip and organizing get-togethers.
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.
> 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.
Eh, that's improvement, but the world didn't change because of a small forest.
You (and your parent comment) said “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Very few things change the world meaningfully.
And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.
Splitting hairs.
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.
The point is precisely that you don’t need a social networking platform to do something meaningful.
I don't think the author was talking about isolated change like planting some seeds.
Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.
> isolated
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.
50K people is a limited community to move to another platform???
Yes, yes it is. By definition. “Limited” means “restricted in size”, not “an arbitrary number a random person thinks is small”. From the moment OP defined “this is for this specific community of this size”, it is limited. It will be abundantly clear when they have moved no one, or every one, or a critical mass, or not enough. Because it’s limited, bounded, constrained.
Well in that case so is the total population of earth.
We’re not discussing the total population of the Earth. The thing about words is that their meaning may depend on context.
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.
And for the purposes of the stated goal, for one person or even a company to get 50K people to switch from Facebook or to use another platform especially when all someone else has to do is start a group on Facebook, might as well be “the number of people on earth” difficult.
Yes, I agree, I’ve said that several hours ago.
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.
Mincing words and splitting hairs again.
Words have meanings. Communication between humans, which you’re keenly defending, depends on a shared understanding of them. I haven’t commented on it until now, but in my view you’re splitting hairs by repeatedly creating your own definitions (e.g. defining what is “real” change or not; changing the definition of words you said; saying “improvement” is not “change”; misunderstanding “limited”). So your repeated accusations don’t really land.
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.
Yeah, and mincing words to make a silly argument valid isn't communication, it's arguing for arguments sake.
He very literally did change the world. There wasn’t a forest there and now there is. In fact the conception of “the world” as an abstract global concept is much less impactful than what people see outside their window and in their city/community.
Maybe that's why OP is looking for an alternative to use for communication and organization?
Do you think its a better place, or do the users think its a better place? Take political partisanship out of it. So its about a 30/30/40 breakdown between Trump/Harris/None. So 70% of people either Support or Don't care that much about Trump, and that's assuming that every single democratic voter is angry enough to quit Facebook over this, this is probably not true. You are looking at probably >85% of people that don't think that getting rid of Facebook would make things better.
A better world is subjective.
Is Facebook though the perfect community tool? Using centralized systems has advantages (simple/easy/available/cheap) but also disadvantages (less customization/less control/more expensive). When Facebook appeared maybe the alternatives were not there due to technical complexity is this still the case nowadays?...
There were alternatives, but the network effect is real. Facebook wants people to stay on their platform, sure, but people also like staying in one app if they can. They know how to use it, and it's not yet another app.
> 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.
> because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President.
"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.
Are you talking about his role censoring for the current, or for the former admin? His flip flopping shows such a lack of character. However, being selectively outraged because this time he is doing it for someone you disagree with, which a lot of people are, reveals the real motives.
He didn't censor for the former president
He did, and has said so publicly: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo
He did not, and if you follow the actual facts and read the internal communications you find out he lied
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...
Wow, that misinterpretation of "you can't yell fire in a crowded theatre" is really something. Do you think that's a smoking gun that he's shamelessly manipulating the audience, or is he really that dense (or, I suppose to be fair... is it an honest mistake - we all have blind spots)?
ok so where do those who have been consistently mad at the people variously in power going back to 2016 or even 2008 go to complain? non-partisan free speech believers exist
I agree. I like nostr the most out of the similar attempts at creating a standards based multi client social graph. Not a huge fan of federated servers like Mastodon. Bluesky seems like it has some good parts with the @ protocol, but is quite bad at non-partisanship in practice.
People are gonna stay upset for quite a while. The billion dollar election manipulation campaign spanning Reddit/Tiktok/Youtube/Television was extremely effective. It convinced a very, very specific kind of person that the by-the-numbers worst candidate in modern history was going to win in an absolute landslide.
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.
>being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis
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??
I was about to say Musk doesn't have an actual role in government but I guess an executive order has made DOGE real, by renaming US Digital Service the US Doge Service.
I think you need to make the argument about Nazis on its merits. Trump's people do much that fits the definition of fascism, many try to normalize or advocate for fascism, dictatorship, and even normalize Hitler. His most prominent member of government did a proto-Nazi salute (and don't say he's too dumb to know what it would look like).
And that paragraph would not be objectionable to many people in that political grouping.
"History doesn't repeat but it sure does rhyme a lot"
The point is that the people he's trying to communicate with don't care about that. You don't need to argue about that here, it's not relevant.
Dying? It isn't free speech if you can say what you like, but can only do it in a sound proofed room, alone.
He’s talking about private groups.
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.
> Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice.
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.
Again, during the civil rights movement there was no social media and mainstream media.
You use personal outreach and then you build up from there. There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc
> 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.
Then that’s their problem. I doubt that there is any group that you can’t start locally and build up a following.
> They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication
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.
> 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.
You don't have the right for anyone to care about what you say, and never have.
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?
And? If you are on a platform and depending on random people finding your message, how are you going to get above the noise?
You have to put in the work. Major changes happen by people getting thier voice out before social media
Much in the same way you are allowed to criticize Putin in Russia.
So long as you do it in a sound proofed room.
Huh? When has Facebook ever implemented political censorship on behalf of Trump? I am not aware of a single case of such a thing even being requested, let alone granted. The scandals about government-directed social media censorship were under Biden's admin, not under Trump's.
"Instagram hides search results for 'Democrats'" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g32yxpdz0o
> 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.
This is really obviously not intentional, let alone requested by the Trump admin.
Definitely curious to see how long it takes to get fixed, now that it has gotten media attention.
While I agree about Trump, Facebook has censored left-wing causes such as Palestinians. Zuckerberg's embrace of Trump, including possibly getting approval for Facebook's recent changes, raises many concerns.
Free speech died when Covid came along.
Yes, Zuckerberg admitted that this is what used to happen under Biden recently on a podcast,
> 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.
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.
Most people in the US have already quit that app, the battle's not that uphill. You're starting half up
This is not my experience living in a small (~5,000) city , Facebook is where everything, farmer's markets, fairs and festivals, and other community events are announced and organized.
That seems wrong. More than half the US population uses Facebook. https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...
There is absolutely no way that 80% of the US actively uses Facebook.
> Most people in the US have already quit that app
Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?
>> 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.
This doesn’t jibe with publicly available statistics..
yup, quitting in droves ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarter...
That shows quarterly revenue not user activity in the US? In my orbit there is nearly 0 Facebook usage outside of a few boomers but instagram seems very popular.
So you’re going to ignore publicly available information based on your anecdote?
"In my orbit" there 100% of the people play racquetball which means there are roughly 350 million players in the USA - hence it is the most popular sport on the planet and owner of my local team is richer than all NFL owners combined /s :)
Also see https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... just for kicks :)
ok well at least that's the number that was being discussed.
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.
Most people you know may have. But most people have not quit Facebook.
> because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President
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.
We have local community groups on FB. One for our hamlet of about 50 houses. Some households refuse to join as they don't do Facebook. I only do Facebook because of the local group. I long ago gave up trying to fill those people in. It is somewhat of a pain.
This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services out of concern for the long term stability or safety of that platform - you assumed their motives and turned it into a political statement right out of the gate.
> This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services
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".
No it isn't. Moving yourself off of a platform is one thing. Moving 200k random users off (for reasons?) is impossible.
Everyone wants to move off Facebook. The platform is shit and its main job is to shovel posts you don't want to read at your face so you scroll past them and view more ads.
Exactly, is OP really the one who should be influencing others preferences? Most couldn’t give two shits about the technological perils that await them just over the horizon - and should you really be the one to inform them of those horrors? Just relax - and embrace the book of faces. The movement will be swift and relatively painless, mostly.
(Disclaimer: I've never tried to move large numbers of people off of Facebook; I have organized community groups from scratch before, and I have led initiatives at work that consisted largely of convincing people to do a thing. Much of this advice is from that perspective. YMMV.)
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.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is
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.
Let’s be honest, Nextdoor is about people seeing that a black person is suspiciously going into a home using their garage door opener, driving in their garage and using their key…
Remove "black" and it's the description of living in a small town.
I wonder if a subreddit would work?
Nextdoor dot com is actually even more toxic than a lot of Facebook is and I would avoid at all costs.
My problem w/ a subreddit is that reddit would show you a lot of stuff that is off-mission for the group and surrounding community. Also I'd expect such a page to be focused around getting people to show up to events rather than having discussions (e.g. the moderation problem is much easier if discussions are only for the purposes of the group; off-topic rants about divisive subjects are easy to squash; you don't have the problem of the rumor mongering about crime which I think is toxic on nextdoor but doesn't cross the line)
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.
I have found that Nextdoor isn't toxic, your neighbors are
Nah, most of my neighbors are nice people who I talk with in person.
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.
There are local Craigslist forums if Nextdoor isn't weird enough for you
Go low-tech and start printing a small local newspaper.
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.
We have one of these small little local magazines that prints every two weeks with all the local events and stories and humor. It's free (paid for by ads for local businesses), and delivered in bundles to all the local outfits.
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.
My neighborhood has a guy who runs a small blog/newsletter. It's pretty good! They do roundups on new businesses, events, schools, talks to the city council rep from time to time, and has a generally positive community vibe.
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.
Add to this:
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.
Every even mid sized US city use to have a Village Voice knock off free paper but even the Village Voice went under almost 8 years ago.
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.
local newspaper with an online version. You can then use the online version to try to use to hook the people into some alternative online platform for the community (a mailing list, a forum, something more advanced)
This seems awesome actually. And a practical path in a small place. Print --> Online --> Online Community
Yes, do this and learn firsthand why all the small-town newspapers are gone. Printing, paper, and distribution is expensive, and nobody will pay enough for print ads anymore to cover the costs.
This sounds like a fun hobby.
Or, just mail a copy to everyone once a month. I don’t think 50K mailers costs all that much these days. Maybe start smaller? 5K?
One successful version of what you're asking about seems to be the Vermont based Front Porch Forum. They have gotten some press in the last year and there was this thread about them on hackernews a while back : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208506
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! :)
I've wondered how FPF has managed to pull off such an achievement. Perhaps FPF became the local standard, reaching a self-sustaining mass of users before the Facebook and Nextdoor marketing machines saturated user attention elsewhere in the country?
Having grown up nearby, there is a strong sense of roots people have out there, as well as a strong preference for local-made everything. Think of it as a rural, fairly well-educated anti-Walmart energy. It may be hard to reprodu e that environment and even harder to start something like that up once alternatives are already available.
I came here to say the same. Having recently moved to VT, FPF has been a real eye opener in terms of civil, useful local discourse. I don't think it's in the DNA of people in Vermont since the local subreddits for VT and communities are just as weird as they are other places I've looked at.
For events specifically, my cohort (somewhere between Gen-Z and Millenial) have moved event organizing entirely to Partiful, which I've found to be far superior to Facebook Events. Doesn't help with group posts though.
I’ll second Partiful.
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.
Any idea what the business model is?
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
From Google:
> 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 run a discussion group that meets once a month - our tech stack is 1. A blog running WordPress that I use to announce meetings 2. A meetup.com account (free tier) that has the same information as the blog 3. A MailChimp account (free tier) where I send notices about the meetups 4. A very active Slack group (free tier) where I announce meetups and we have entended discussions. Discord would probably work just as well.
I've never used Facebook for anything, but the above four tools work very well for us.
This is why Facebook ended up being the tool of choice. Stay in one app instead of logging into 2 and checking your email and a website. I'm only surprised that 1-3 can't all be done via Meetup.
> Stay in one app instead of logging into 2 and checking your email and a website.
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.
They all can be done through Meetup - I think the point here is that multiple channels avoids vendor lock-in and increases the likelihood that a user will overlap with one of the 4 communication strategies.
All of those can be done on meetup - but then we would lose a lot of people who are not, and will not be on Meetup.
The email list is probably the single most important part of the tech stack actually.
Discord has replaced facebook and reddit for some of my communities and it works really well in general. Unfortunately we are seeing them turn toward incorporating ads which is somewhat offputting. I'm already looking into a self hosted discourse forum as an alternative but it lacks the immediacy of live chat for better or worse
You don’t see how much more work that is?
I've got it down to 45 minutes a month, including a phone call to the venue.
And what happens when he gets tired of managing all of that? With Facebook he can just give someone else admin access.
Organizing people takes work, and passing off a single set of credentials to someone else doesn't mean that work will still get done - whether its all in one place or not. Look at all the subreddits which are lost because of no moderation, even when they used to have a team.
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.
I can just give the logins to someone else. My current setup is a workable, optimal, but not clean solution to the problem.
Going to toss my hat in the ring about community shift. You don’t need to get everyone to move over to a new platform. You have to get the 5 most active members to switch. Communities are very largely built up of lurkers and a very small majority carry the weight of providing leadership and content. No matter the tech you choose, find a way to get those key people to switch and maybe the rest will follow.
* Look into Diaspora. (https://diasporafoundation.org/). Upside: It's basically a self-hosted facebook. Really cool project. Downside: Unlike facebook, there's no fake/pushed content so it tended to feel stale.
* 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.
> Downside: Unlike facebook, there's no fake/pushed content so it tended to feel stale.
It would be cool if they had a scraper that could pre-populate the system with some content from Facebook.
Or go for the small-town gossip feel and have fun with $10 in LLM credits.
"Generate a quick (salacious|funny|sad) story involving (random group member) and (random object) happening at (randomly selected location)."
Maybe have a look at mobilizon : https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
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.
Indico is a not-framasoft open-source made in CERN event organisation solution : https://getindico.io/
Not sure that the intention is to organise a seminar series...
> main features: > Multi-granular tree-based protection scheme
that will drain users from Facebook instantly! i can already see the flood of people coming. /s
Honestly, to me the main feature is that people tend to upload their slides to indico hosted conferences, but that's more of a cultural feature.
Thanks for the link. This leads us to one proxy of the system's usability, namely the current base of installations: https://instances.joinmobilizon.org/instances
> it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft
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.
Framapad, Framacalc and Framadate are used quite a lot around here.
I’m cofounder of an app called dateit an event planning and RSVP app we have been developing over the past couple of years. We started it because we noticed many of our friends were leaving Facebook, and group texts were becoming a hassle. While it might not have every feature you’re looking for just yet, we’re actively working to expand its functionality. In the future, we’re hoping to introduce features like communities and a public events feed.
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.
I run a few community groups using Discourse. It's great because there's a mode where you can make it into a type of listserv/forum hybrid. If people are more comfortable in e-mail, they can use that. If they want to use their web browser, they can use that. Works great on mobile. Easy to self-host.
We have a local email list. Hosted on google groups, but I suppose you could use a tool like https://groups.io/ or self-host as well.
Came here to suggest groups.io as a mailing list. I use it for my HOA--we need timely notifications (trash pickup delays, parking bans, etc.) and a lot of folks don't have (or want) Facebook. It has solid moderation tools, apps if you want them (you don't need them), and some useful bonus features (calendars, polls, wikis, docs, etc.) if you find yourself needing them.
We moved to groups.io years ago when yahoo groups folded. It's very feature-rich and completely free. I have been expecting some sort of monetization attempt but so far nothing.
I have no idea how it makes money, which is sadly worrying these days...
This is salient given policy moves by the CEO. My thoughts:
-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.
More question, how are you going to deal with SPAM and moderation?
yeah I suppose that is also a main issue - i.e. whatever monetary model behind it needs to fund teams that addresses that point
There is a software that has a technopolitical project behind it called Decidim. It comes from the legacy of 15M - 2011 in Spain, where the organisers needed an alternative like the one you mention, and to have a ‘facebook of democracy’: https://tecnopolitica.net/en/content/white-paper-decidim. The Barcelona City Council made the project possible and now it has an international community with more than 400 organisations, including many local communities. Apart from being an open source and democratic project, it is a very mature product that has not lost the orientation of the spirit of its creation.
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:)
I'd echo others that you probably won't succeed, but there is still an action you can take, which is to create new communities elsewhere.
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.
Haha. discord is the only social app that would be worse for this purpose than facecrook.
That said, your main point is solid.
>I want to move our local communities
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?
Your issue is going to be that people don’t want to keep track of yet another platform.
You may be able to get away with the free tier of Slack.
My local communities are on (in order of popularity): facebook, telegram, discord, facebook messenger, signal. Some attempted to migrate to mastodon and bluesky but those were all failures, since getting a large and diverse group to sign up for something new is a herculean task. You just need one popular poster to refuse to leave a platform for everyone to refuse to leave. I personally just use burner accounts under my hamsters name for everything, lock down my permissions, use an RSS reader to see all my groups and friends facebook posts without having to visit (feedbro, all posts set to public).
Similar experience for me. Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and telegram groups. Some years ago somebody tried to move people to signal groups, but it went nowhere… and this is Germany, where there is no sympathy for Meta and in general people are quite privacy aware.
It depends on what kind of community you want. Something like Facebook Events, I haven’t really seen a successful alternative for.
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.
How many people in rural America are going to be familiar with Discourse? And if the end goal is to have a discussion forum and you are trying to meet the needs of the people, why would they care about it being self hosted and what happens when the original poster gets board?
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.
Start a Slack and invite your community to it. Moderate it graciously with a simple, public, fair code of conduct. Make sure all the FB users are invited. The features just beat Facebook IMHO.
Facebook, specifically each and _every_ "feature" it implements, is certainly not the only way to "organize local communities" using a computer network. Remember that Facebook is ultimately designed to serve advertisers not community organisers. Advertisers are the customers.
I know someone who committed a misdemeanor and is on probation, one term of which is that he's not allowed to use "social media" (chat, etc.) although he can use plain ordinary web sites.
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.
oh wow, this concept deserves its own post. Imagine emergency evacuation info being unattainable like this.
Website to announce and register interest, mailing list or blog to post. You can send your website updates to Facebook for the first few months then kill it once everyone is on board.
Yeah, simply write some .html, .css and .js files, just `scp` it over to your VPS and then easily setup Mailman with systemd. Easy peazy :)
One of the things I'm curious about is given Zuck's reputation for childish behavior and jealousy if alternative links will even get outright censored in the feed (or even through Messenger?!)
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
For self-hosted and federated community building, might I suggest NodeBB?
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.
With "fully federates", do you mean that it can share forum categories and/or posts with other NodeBB servers?
The rural areas I've been a part of tend to have one or more noticeboards, either on the main street, or often at the main supermarket. People put up flyers, business cards, possibly with links or qrcodes, or otherwise phone numbers.
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.
A friend recently moved to a rural area, and this question came up. I mentioned Fediverse as one possibility, with caveats.
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.
https://Hylo.com is trying to be that alternative, they're not federated yet (longer-term goal i think) but they are open-source.
I live in a small community that relies on Facebook, and I would be shocked if you could get people to switch. You might get a few, but the network effect is strong enough that most will stay on Facebook.
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.
We use https://groups.io/ and are happy
I've also been happy with Groups.io. A local community moved there a few years ago when Yahoo Groups shut down.
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
Yup. Same situation. I suspect same motivation. Interested in collaboration.
I've never used this before but you can try:
2i2wbyza4 at mozmail dot com
Or suggest a contact method.
I have a similar pain in my rural community. All the restaurants and businesses post their news on the two local facebook groups, pretty much in lieu of having updated websites. I'd love it if there was a non-terrible alternative for this use case.
Somehow some way, the end game needs to be entities curating space they own (websites) and syndicating out to platforms for reach/engagement. Indieweb has the fundamentals, but no path nor intention for broad uptake.
Anyone have bright new ideas on this angle?
> I want to move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform
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.
Well, do your community want to move off facebook?
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
I'd first figure out how much of it is something you want to do vs. something everyone wants to do.
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.
I've had some success with looking at meetup.com and finding when some kind of group is going to meet up somewhere, show up, and see if things click. I played some board games recently and then got added to the weekly text notification and now have some adults to chill with when I have an opening on that day.
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.
In my experience this never works
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)
A WhatsApp group might well be an easier alternative for many people, although it's another Meta company if that's a concern.
Whatsapp belongs to Meta. A group on Signal would be entirely outside the Zuckerberg-verse.
I'm aware of the link, but people don't have Signal, everyone has WhatsApp.
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/...
Zucker-verse has a nice ring to it. It's a place for all those zuckers ;)
If it's the United States, people don't use WhatsApp very much. Still, it's just another Meta app like all the others.
A club I'm active with posts everything to Meetup and Facebook. Meetup is the "official" source of truth for posting events and photos and limited chats related to the events themselves ("Where are we parking?" type questions). Facebook for social chat and announcing "unofficial" hangouts/parties.
Meetup is often used in the groups I'm in. A friend used to organize and it cost the organizers money but no the members. It was pretty ad free.
Now they're asking members to sign up (and pay) for more feature (meetup plus). and show ads. But still decent for organizing meetings.
I would 100% recommend https://www.mightynetworks.com/ Look at the case studies as well to see how successful communities have been on this platform http://www.mightynetworks.com/case-studies
Hard to say without more info. What's this community? What's the nature of the subjects around which this community is built?
Communities are made of people, do you think they'd be willing to move?
>We have 5-6 small (~50k people) towns, all well connected. Everything happens on Facebook.
Network effect is always the party pooper. If everyone's using Facebook it's unlikely they'll want to switch to anything else.
Good old fashioned email listservs are always an option.
I've had some success with Humhub. Writeup here: https://www.shareddigitalguides.org.uk/guides/social-network...
The obvious Fediverse alternative for Facebook is https://friendi.ca
It federates with Mastodon and co.
Some statistics: https://fedidb.org/software/friendica
Depends what your community needs. I'm part of a dance group that only needs to communicate events, so most communication happens by email (BCC from organizer to everyone). Then, anything more complicated happens in-person or through other channels.
The only alternative I can think of that all of your community probably already have is email. Set up an email mailing list and lock it down so only members of your community and those invited by your community can use it. Despite the wishes of some here email will never go away and will be used by anyone communicating with businesses.
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.
I'd suggest a different approach. I'm not sure how feasible it is for your case but just my 2 cents.
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.
The neighborhood I live in runs a listserve that's very active. I'm not sure what made them choose a listserve over facebook, maybe it predates FB. The neighborhood is historic and there's an association that runs it.
Sorry I don't have time to look if a good solution exists, but you have to check out framalibre by framasoft. Half the apps they recommend don't really work out of the box, but the rest is pretty good, and everything can be self-hosted.
https://framalibre.org/ (it's french only, sorry)
Good luck!
If you're adventurous, you could try:
It's early alpha - here's the story behind it:
'Network effects' make this kind of move quite difficult unless there's a really compelling reason. You'd want to aim to maybe start from scratch with a dedicated group.
I've been trying to get out more, and attend some events/groups IRL (sports, hobbies, whatever). They all might be in meetup, but all communication is happening in FB groups, FB messenger, Insta, Discord, etc. I don't have either and it makes things seriously more difficult...
Mate! I'm building exactly this! https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
Let me know if this is what you're after and you want some help setting up an instance.
Does anyone know a tool to form groups on AT protocol? Maybe custom feeds? That would be a great feature! I’ve been meaning to look into it for a while.
I agree with everyone else saying you probably shouldn't unless everyone else is asking for it, but additionally why would it be a plus for being self-hosted? The last thing I'd want to do is move from the big city to a rural community and try to supplant their communication platform in a way that leaves me and only me responsible for it.
There are a few alternatives out there but nothing which has anything like the network effect of the big players. Spond seems to be popular in some areas (not just for sports teams as advertised).
I have same problem and landed on using simplelists.com for email groups. Users don’t have to install anything or get yet another account.
Still, I would like to find something that does text, email, and basic group features like calendar and photos
You might want to move, but do all ~49,999 other people share the same view?
I know I’ve been posting this a few times over the past few months, but I haven’t started promoting it yet to the world.
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.
#YangGang
looks full featured from the screenshots.. but... 6 stars??
I'm working on building a simple, open source, no-frills app for people who just want a basic tool to organize small communities. If you're interested in something like that let me know.
Are we talking 50k people per town? So over a quarter of a million people in total, each with more connections to other people outside said towns?
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.
> you only have one shot
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.
When you’re trying to move a significant mass of people from something that works to another platform for ideological reasons, you’ll be met with resistance. Every time you fail you’ll be met with more until you can move no one.
“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.
> When you’re trying to move a significant mass of people from something that works to another platform for ideological reasons, you’ll be met with resistance. Every time you fail you’ll be met with more until you can move no one.
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.
Before looking for a solution, have you checked with your community if there's even interest in an alternative? I have yet to meet a non-tech person that cares about this issue.
There are a few I'd recommend:
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.
One thing I would keep in mind is that you're most likely going to have to maintain both communities for a long time to get people to transition to the new one.
What sort of features are you looking for in a community platform?
Why don’t you build it? Just the features people need of course. Seems like the kind of thing LLMs are quite good at (giving you prototypes).
What about a subreddit?
You need a private subreddit. Do not use nextdoor, we do admin there and it's just constantly fending off racist garbage.
Find an open-source social media project.
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.
The activitypub based pixelfed servers are open source and give an Instagram like experience. And there is the advantage that it can federate with outside fediverse feeds too
Why not Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org/
WhatsApp groups are big in the UK, I think you can do QR join codes.
Does Nextdoor have anything useful for you? They have community events and so forth.
I don't know about your nextdoor, but my nextdoor is complete trash. Half the posts are people asking for trades people recommendations and the other half are "this [minority] person walked by my house twice, anyone know if they're a criminal?"
Community building on that platform seems like it'd be really difficult with it's current atmosphere.
Oh, it's the pettiest platform. I used to like going on there and imperiously reminding everyone that we're all neighbours when things got heated.
This seems like a great way to splinter your community.
There's always phpBB (old school) or Discord (new school).
There are a couple commercial options in this space.
Example: mightynetworks.com
I tried to sign up for this to check it out but it requires an instagram account or some existing online media presence…pretty big barrier to entry for someone looking to leave Meta properties.
It's hard to read with all the fancy scrolling.
discourse is nice: https://mixpeek.com/community
Here is list of available software from my hosting company, $150/yr, for Forums, and Social Networking. Another I had on my own server was Citadel, (citadel.org).
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
Craigslist is still very active and very much a thing.
depends on what experience you want... a lot of communities exist on just a chat app like whatsapp (europe mostly), line (east asia), etc
Could a Patreon or Medium or Subspace page work for this? Announcements, mailing list, even a payment system for beer money
Lu.ma is great.
Use Lu.ma for the calendar + newsletter, and whatever platform has least friction for the most people for peer-to-peer communication (WhatsApp would be the answer in Europe, I dunno about your rural community).
Unless they all want to... You can't.
Everything I do is either a Whatsapp group or a Telegram group these days. Whatsapp is owned by Meta but is at least encrypted, private and free from the bullshit of a real social media. Telegram is a better alternative if you really want to leave Meta behind. People will suggest Signal but in my experience literally nobody uses it except radical organisers. I have only one group on there and its for a protest group. Nobody else ever even messages me on there.
I've managed to persuade some people and groups to use Signal. If I could find a way to use Whatsapp without Meta being able to identify me via my phone number and ransack my contacts then I would, reluctantly, give it a go.
It’s owned by Facebook
Knocking on a door and actually talking with people. Barring that a ham bbs that geographically covers your tegion.
when's the last time you were happy and excited when someone randomly knocked on your door? exactly
About four weeks ago when i got a random offer for about 10 free laying chickens.
When you live in a rural area, you're way more isolated. Remember when the lockdowns were finally over and you were happy to just be able to interact with people again, even if you were an introvert like me? It's kinda like that.
Also, door to door salesmen don't tend to go to rural areas.
why is this
Random people knocking on your door is in-person spam that is much more expensive for you to receive
May I suggest getting to know your community and understanding what their problems are before trying to change it.