Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42779776

by recvonline • 1 year ago

407 357 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

I want to move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution or any collaborators I can join to move something along?

EDIT: I live in a more rural community (moved from a big city). We have 5-6 small (~50k people) towns, all well connected. Everything happens on Facebook. I would like to move to a different platforms. Plus points for self-hosted, federated.

scarface_7416• 1 year ago

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.

prisenco• 1 year ago

Good old fashioned email listservs are always an option.

yurishimo• 1 year ago

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.

scarface_7416• 1 year ago

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.

tgirod• 1 year ago

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.

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

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.

rhizome31• 1 year ago

Framapad, Framacalc and Framadate are used quite a lot around here.

BaudouinVH2• 1 year ago

Indico is a not-framasoft open-source made in CERN event organisation solution : https://getindico.io/

1oooqooq• 1 year ago

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

SiempreViernes2• 1 year ago

Not sure that the intention is to organise a seminar series...

everybodyknows2• 1 year ago

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

holri• 1 year ago

We use https://groups.io/ and are happy

nofinator• 1 year ago

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

gchamonlive• 1 year ago

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?

arccy• 1 year ago

depends on what experience you want... a lot of communities exist on just a chat app like whatsapp (europe mostly), line (east asia), etc

xnorswap2• 1 year ago

A WhatsApp group might well be an easier alternative for many people, although it's another Meta company if that's a concern.

BaudouinVH2• 1 year ago

Whatsapp belongs to Meta. A group on Signal would be entirely outside the Zuckerberg-verse.

gorjusborg• 1 year ago

Zucker-verse has a nice ring to it. It's a place for all those zuckers ;)

xnorswap2• 1 year ago

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/...

jdlyga• 1 year ago

If it's the United States, people don't use WhatsApp very much. Still, it's just another Meta app like all the others.

chneu• 1 year ago

Craigslist is still very active and very much a thing.

slackfan2• 1 year ago

Knocking on a door and actually talking with people. Barring that a ham bbs that geographically covers your tegion.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

when's the last time you were happy and excited when someone randomly knocked on your door? exactly

Jgoure• 1 year ago

why is this

Clubber• 1 year ago

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.

slackfan2• 1 year ago

About four weeks ago when i got a random offer for about 10 free laying chickens.

ecshafer2• 1 year ago

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.

sebstefan• 1 year ago

Most people in the US have already quit that app, the battle's not that uphill. You're starting half up

pavel_lishin• 1 year ago

Most people in the US have already quit that app

Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?

tartuffe78• 1 year ago

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.

arbor_day• 1 year ago

That seems wrong. More than half the US population uses Facebook. https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...

bdangubic4• 1 year ago

yup, quitting in droves ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarter...

scarface_7416• 1 year ago

This doesn’t jibe with publicly available statistics..

that_guy_iain• 1 year ago

Most people you know may have. But most people have not quit Facebook.

ADeerAppeared2• 1 year ago

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.

karaterobot• 1 year ago

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.

sirsinsalot• 1 year ago

Dying? It isn't free speech if you can say what you like, but can only do it in a sound proofed room, alone.

javier1234543212• 1 year ago

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.

gadders3• 1 year ago

Yes, Zuckerberg admitted that this is what used to happen under Biden recently on a podcast,

XCabbage2• 1 year ago

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.

briandear4• 1 year ago

Free speech died when Covid came along.

coldpie6• 1 year ago

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.

jf227• 1 year ago

If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.

ecshafer2• 1 year ago

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.

underdeserver• 1 year ago

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)

jklinger410• 1 year ago

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.

pimlottc• 1 year ago

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.

tobyjsullivan• 1 year ago

   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.

- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

pc862• 1 year ago

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).

bottled_poe• 1 year ago

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.

JohnMakin• 1 year ago

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.

tredre3• 1 year ago

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".

bongodongobob2• 1 year ago

No it isn't. Moving yourself off of a platform is one thing. Moving 200k random users off (for reasons?) is impossible.

mplewis2• 1 year ago

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.

lsllc2• 1 year ago

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.

seb1204• 1 year ago

I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.

ghaff• 1 year ago

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).

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

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.

dawnerd2• 1 year ago

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.

ilrwbwrkhv• 1 year ago

Yep, and this is what I have been telling people that the reason why Trump won is because the right cares much more about their agenda than the left. It's all just surface level virtue signaling for the left, which they will drop immediately if they get a good discount on a local mirror in a city group. On the other hand, be openly LGBT friendly and see if a Trumper comes to buy from your store. Not a single one will.

hallman76• 1 year ago

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.

kcplate• 1 year ago

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.

chickenfeed• 1 year ago

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.

honestSysAdmin• 1 year ago

Rural USA is extremely distrustful and quick to show both that distrust and disdain towards any Silicon Valley based company. "Technology is bad" is the general sentiment. These are "fossil of America" places where privacy is highly valued.

This is just my anecdotal experience, overwhelming anecdotal data, and I won't mention the specific regions so as to maintain my respect for those regions by not "out"ing them for having their views.

gadders3• 1 year ago

"Hi everyone. I want to inconvenience hundreds of people because of my minority political beliefs."

20after4• 1 year ago

Facebook has gone to shit long before any controversy around the CEO's political posturing. The content/spam+slop ratio is pretty dismal at this point. I am sure a lot of people are ready to jump ship, given a viable alternative for even some subset of the features that they like.

For me personally, the only features that remain at all interesting on Facebook are Marketplace, Groups and maybe Events. Does anyone still use Craigslist? It was always terrible so I don't know if there is an alternative for Marketplace but Groups and Events aren't even done that well on Facebook so that seems like a reasonable place to start as far as an MVP.

7thaccount• 1 year ago

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.

pluc• 1 year ago

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.

diggan2• 1 year ago

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 :)

aklemm• 1 year ago

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?

EGreg• 1 year ago

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:

https://qbix.com/communities

Or just look at these PDFs:

https://qbix.com/community.pdf

https://qbix.com/alumni.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.

qntmfred• 1 year ago

#YangGang

bzmrgonz• 1 year ago

looks full featured from the screenshots.. but... 6 stars??

eigart• 1 year ago

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.

helboi43• 1 year ago

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.

gvurrdon• 1 year ago

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.

benatkin2• 1 year ago

It’s owned by Facebook

helboi43• 1 year ago

Did you read my comment smartass? Do you think I don't know that?

dv_dt• 1 year ago

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

davidw3• 1 year ago

'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.

doodda• 1 year ago

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.

julianlam2• 1 year ago

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.

rsolva2• 1 year ago

With "fully federates", do you mean that it can share forum categories and/or posts with other NodeBB servers?

julianlam2• 1 year ago

Yes! You can share topics and posts with other NodeBB forums and software implementing ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.)

namenumber• 1 year ago

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! :)

everybodyknows2• 1 year ago

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?

lubujackson• 1 year ago

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.

bwanab• 1 year ago

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.

beisner• 1 year ago

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.

nzoschke• 1 year ago

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.

dangoor• 1 year ago

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

darknavi• 1 year ago

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.

EyMaddis2• 1 year ago

I can throw my site Partey.io into the mix. Works without VC backing for free (I run it and it’s cheap for me). No need to expose your phone number, an invite is just a link you can share.

teopatl• 1 year ago

Could a Patreon or Medium or Subspace page work for this? Announcements, mailing list, even a payment system for beer money

flanbiscuit• 1 year ago

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.

nmorenoEM• 1 year ago

https://werz.at

gardnr• 1 year ago

It's hard to read with all the fancy scrolling.

righthand2• 1 year ago

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.

hk1337• 1 year ago

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?

Stronico4• 1 year ago

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.

scarface_7416• 1 year ago

You don’t see how much more work that is?

Stronico4• 1 year ago

I've got it down to 45 minutes a month, including a phone call to the venue.

robertlagrant6• 1 year ago

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.

jaimie• 1 year ago

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.

latexr14• 1 year ago

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.

johnneville• 1 year ago

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

cwoolfe• 1 year ago

Why not Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org/

weberer• 1 year ago

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?

mattlutze• 1 year ago

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.

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

This sounds like a fun hobby.

fatline• 1 year ago

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)

wnolens• 1 year ago

This seems awesome actually. And a practical path in a small place. Print --> Online --> Online Community

hedora• 1 year ago

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?

tobinfekkes• 1 year ago

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.

coffeefirst• 1 year ago

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.

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

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.

dutchbookmaker• 1 year ago

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.

protocolture• 1 year ago

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.

latexr14• 1 year ago

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.

mmooss7• 1 year ago

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.

latexr14• 1 year ago

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.

LinuxBender• 1 year ago

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.

jasode• 1 year ago

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.

jaymzcampbell• 1 year ago

This is such a great answer. You've given me flashbacks to many zoom meetings that started with "Can't we just...".

heavyset_go• 1 year ago

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.

PaulHoule6• 1 year ago

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.

RealityVoid• 1 year ago

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.

miohtama• 1 year ago

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.

willywanker2• 1 year ago

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).

hkt• 1 year ago

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.

candu• 1 year ago

(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.

PaulHoule6• 1 year ago

The first thing that comes to mind for me is

https://nextdoor.com/

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.

davidw3• 1 year ago

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.

rcpt• 1 year ago

There are local Craigslist forums if Nextdoor isn't weird enough for you

scarface_7416• 1 year ago

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…

luizfzs• 1 year ago

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.

robertlagrant6• 1 year ago

Does Nextdoor have anything useful for you? They have community events and so forth.

malfist• 1 year ago

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.

robertlagrant6• 1 year ago

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.

mig39• 1 year ago

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.

inanutshellus• 1 year ago

* 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.

amelius• 1 year ago

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.

redserk2• 1 year ago

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)."

danap• 1 year ago

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

mooreds2• 1 year ago

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.

teeray• 1 year ago

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.

cookie_monsta• 1 year ago

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...

PaulHoule6• 1 year ago

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.

horrible-hilde• 1 year ago

oh wow, this concept deserves its own post. Imagine emergency evacuation info being unattainable like this.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

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.

alexashka• 1 year ago

May I suggest getting to know your community and understanding what their problems are before trying to change it.

carlnewton• 1 year ago

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.

paarals• 1 year ago

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:)

drillsteps5• 1 year ago

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...

bongodongobob2• 1 year ago

Unless they all want to... You can't.

shireboy• 1 year ago

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

65• 1 year ago

There's always phpBB (old school) or Discord (new school).

fullstackhero• 1 year ago

There are a couple commercial options in this space.

Example: mightynetworks.com

sam_uk2• 1 year ago

I've had some success with Humhub. Writeup here: https://www.shareddigitalguides.org.uk/guides/social-network...

geor9e• 1 year ago

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).

paride5745• 1 year ago

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.

hombre_fatal• 1 year ago

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.

afiodorov• 1 year ago

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).

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

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.

caycep2• 1 year ago

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.

RegnisGnaw• 1 year ago

More question, how are you going to deal with SPAM and moderation?

caycep2• 1 year ago

yeah I suppose that is also a main issue - i.e. whatever monetary model behind it needs to fund teams that addresses that point

oddb0d• 1 year ago

If you're adventurous, you could try:

https://theweave.social/moss/

It's early alpha - here's the story behind it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh1UVlIKvNg

bastardoperator• 1 year ago

You need a private subreddit. Do not use nextdoor, we do admin there and it's just constantly fending off racist garbage.

orwin• 1 year ago

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!

khrbrt• 1 year ago

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.

acomjean• 1 year ago

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.

red_admiral• 1 year ago

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).

fooker• 1 year ago

This seems like a great way to splinter your community.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

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.

wintermutestwin• 1 year ago

Haha. discord is the only social app that would be worse for this purpose than facecrook.

That said, your main point is solid.

seltzered_• 1 year ago

https://Hylo.com is trying to be that alternative, they're not federated yet (longer-term goal i think) but they are open-source.

Neil44• 1 year ago

WhatsApp groups are big in the UK, I think you can do QR join codes.

talkingtab• 1 year ago

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.

neilv• 1 year ago

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.

rylan-talerico• 1 year ago

Lu.ma is great.

kaikai• 1 year ago

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.

qznc• 1 year ago

The obvious Fediverse alternative for Facebook is https://friendi.ca

It federates with Mastodon and co.

Some statistics: https://fedidb.org/software/friendica

scrollaway• 1 year ago

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).

magneticmonkey• 1 year ago

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.

goretron• 1 year ago

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.

tacostakohashi• 1 year ago

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.

dddddaviddddd• 1 year ago

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.

tqi• 1 year ago

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.

vishnunarang• 1 year ago

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

brailsafe• 1 year ago

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.

jfactorial4• 1 year ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulip

https://github.com/zulip/

maxclark• 1 year ago

You might want to move, but do all ~49,999 other people share the same view?

Melatonic2• 1 year ago

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)

willywanker2• 1 year ago

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.

alex1138• 1 year ago

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

bdhcuidbebe• 1 year ago

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

binarymax• 1 year ago

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.

davycro• 1 year ago

What about a subreddit?

Beefin• 1 year ago

discourse is nice: https://mixpeek.com/community

jpcom• 1 year ago

Mailing list

EyMaddis2• 1 year ago

I can see that my site Partey.io[1] is used by several small communities for events. I like a local beekeeper club or town hall meetings.

Maybe that is something that works for you as well if everybody is already connected. It is completely login-less but does only provide event planning features, maybe you need more…(?)

Disclaimer: my site

[1] https://partey.io

rpastuszak• 1 year ago

What about Idealist.org?

amiridis• 1 year ago

If you feel a chat based product can cover your needs, I recommend exploring https://once.com/campfire.

You pay once, self-host, and get unlimited users.

You would have the hosting expenses, but that's nowhere near what a SaaS product would require you to spend.

TCSoft• 1 year ago

Hey, this is a great idea! I've been trying the same thing for my community, but I decided to work at the neighborhood level rather than town level for a lot of the reasons folks mention in this thread. Feel free to shoot me a message through my site, https://www.communityally.org/, I would be happy to chat about my experience if it might help you.

ggariepy• 1 year ago

Band app: https://band.us

landonpaik• 1 year ago

http://about.oliv.org/images/about.png Do you think our service can serve the needs of your local towns? If so, we'd love to help! If not, would love to learn what's missing!

andrewlevver• 1 year ago

Maybe this isn't the right fit, but a company I'm invested in and have advised since its inception is https://app.getriver.io/home

It's built around managing a community, from the perspective of the community manager or head of community. It harnesses the power of hosts, the people who actually make the events happen and captures the free energy in the system of human to human community.

I actually think for your use case it would be perfect. In each town you can crowd source (or directly invite the facebook group admins as hosts) hosts to create events and then run them. The platform started from creating and scaling the All-In Podcast community and now have worked with Tim Ferris, Blueprint/Don't Die, and next week all the events for Utah Tech Week https://app.getriver.io/utahtechweek

scooke• 1 year ago

Check out options on https://softaculous.com/apps/socialnetworking. I have used Elgg, and HumHub seems popular.

mschoeffler2• 1 year ago

One of the biggest problems in local communities is how social media (usually in Nextdoor or Facebook groups) acts like acid for our social bonds. Your neighbors are looking for pancake breakfasts and kids shoveling driveways. What they get instead is anger over Orange Dictator or The Libs.

This divisiveness hurts across the world, but is painful when it goes local. These are people you see at the grocery store or teachers who can retaliate against your kids.

We just launched a hateless social media platform. People can speak freely on any topic, including politics. But a clever combination of aliases, real names, and respect functionality kills off the nastiness.

If any of this rings true to you, I'd love to help.

Mike Schoeffler https://hiweave.com/

scarecrw• 1 year ago

I can't say I've looked too far, but after making an account, two of the first three things I see are:

Do people post online because they care about the cause, or just want to look woke? Respond -Hot topic

and

The guy might be on the spectrum, but he has a good sense of humor. [Link to Elon Musk post about Nazi salute]

I suppose it's possible I just got unlucky, but this doesn't seem to be avoiding the standard pitfalls of social media.

mschoeffler2• 1 year ago

Useful feedback - thanks. The content you're seeing may be misleading for what the platform really does. Let me explain.

The "hot topic" thing is just chatgpt creating conversation starters. Sometimes, its' leaning left, sometimes right, sometimes it's not political. We're tuning it up (mainly to just be more engaging).

The post you saw about Elon Musk ... Everyone is talking about whatever they feel like talking about. If Musk isn't your cup of tea, mute this anonymous person and you don't see each other for a week. It's only a week because maybe one of you was having a bad day. But with repeated muting, they're completely gone. Also nudges the system to group you with people you're going to like better. After enough respects and mutes, you should see the people you enjoy.

The bigger point is what happens once you bring your friends. You guys can talk about anything without getting angry at each other. If they irritate, mute 'em. If you enjoy the conversation, respect them. Enough mutual respect and you can see real names.

rosiesherry• 1 year ago

I've been on the verge of starting a local community. I'll do it one day soon.

When I do, I would start with a website/blog, probably using Ghost. Good community starts with good communication. Comments are just fine for initial community building. Once you have some traction, consider a forum.

Also, look into Front Porch Forum, they've been doing it their own way for years, it can work.

Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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