Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
339 comments
·January 21, 2025jasode
>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.
heavyset_go
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.
PaulHoule
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
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
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.
willywanker
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).
jaymzcampbell
This is such a great answer. You've given me flashbacks to many zoom meetings that started with "Can't we just...".
ecshafer
> 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.
lsllc
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.
dawnerd
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.
lsllc
I actually started with Telegram, then there was some "don't the bad guys use that?" so Signal it was ...
misiek08
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.
seb1204
I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.
ghaff
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
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.
Melatonic
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
coldpie
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.
tobyjsullivan
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.
jklinger410
> 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.
cyanydeez
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.
underdeserver
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)
coldpie
Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.
pc86
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).
danparsonson
Incremental change is also a thing
pimlottc
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.
jf22
If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.
bee_rider
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.
latexr
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-...
diggan
Maybe that's why OP is looking for an alternative to use for communication and organization?
ecshafer
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.
vladms
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?...
coldpie
> 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.
ADeerAppeared
> 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.
javier123454321
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.
blactuary
He didn't censor for the former president
dingnuts
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
karaterobot
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
Dying? It isn't free speech if you can say what you like, but can only do it in a sound proofed room, alone.
scarface_74
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.
ADeerAppeared
Much in the same way you are allowed to criticize Putin in Russia.
So long as you do it in a sound proofed room.
XCabbage
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.
chriswarbo
"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.
mmooss
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.
nxm
[flagged]
nyokodo
[flagged]
blactuary
Everything you said here is false
scarface_74
Musk has been promoting his views and demoting post that he doesn’t agree with.
YeahThisIsMe
Is this a joke comment?
briandear
Free speech died when Covid came along.
gadders
Yes, Zuckerberg admitted that this is what used to happen under Biden recently on a podcast,
kcplate
> 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
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.
sebstefan
Most people in the US have already quit that app, the battle's not that uphill. You're starting half up
tartuffe78
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
That seems wrong. More than half the US population uses Facebook. https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...
mplewis
There is absolutely no way that 80% of the US actively uses Facebook.
pavel_lishin
> Most people in the US have already quit that app
Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?
TuringNYC
>> 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.
scarface_74
This doesn’t jibe with publicly available statistics..
bdangubic
yup, quitting in droves ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarter...
rgbrgb
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.
that_guy_iain
Most people you know may have. But most people have not quit Facebook.
hallman76
> 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.
JohnMakin
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
> 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".
bongodongobob
No it isn't. Moving yourself off of a platform is one thing. Moving 200k random users off (for reasons?) is impossible.
candu
(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.
PaulHoule
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.
scarface_74
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…
narag
Remove "black" and it's the description of living in a small town.
davidw
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.
PaulHoule
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.
some-guy
I have found that Nextdoor isn't toxic, your neighbors are
rcpt
There are local Craigslist forums if Nextdoor isn't weird enough for you
magneticmonkey
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.
mattlutze
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.
tobinfekkes
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
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.
dutchbookmaker
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.
SoftTalker
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.
fatline
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
This seems awesome actually. And a practical path in a small place. Print --> Online --> Online Community
declan_roberts
This sounds like a fun hobby.
hedora
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?
namenumber
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! :)
everybodyknows
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Stronico
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.
robertlagrant
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.
latexr
> 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.
jaimie
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.
Stronico
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.
johnneville
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
scarface_74
You don’t see how much more work that is?
Stronico
I've got it down to 45 minutes a month, including a phone call to the venue.
scarface_74
And what happens when he gets tired of managing all of that? With Facebook he can just give someone else admin access.
inanutshellus
* 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
> 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.
redserk
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)."
tgirod
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.
BaudouinVH
Indico is a not-framasoft open-source made in CERN event organisation solution : https://getindico.io/
SiempreViernes
Not sure that the intention is to organise a seminar series...
1oooqooq
> 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
SiempreViernes
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.
everybodyknows
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
iLoveOncall
> 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
Framapad, Framacalc and Framadate are used quite a lot around here.
mooreds
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
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
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...
mig39
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.
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.