Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

> 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 · a 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.

dawnerd · a 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.

ChrisMarshallNY · a 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.

seb1204 · a year ago

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

ghaff · a 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).

ilrwbwrkhv · a 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.

coldpie · a 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.

tobyjsullivan · a 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)

jklinger410 · a 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.

underdeserver · a 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)

pc86 · a 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).

jf22 · a year ago

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

pimlottc · a 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.

ecshafer · a 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.

ADeerAppeared · a 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.

javier123454321 · a 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.

karaterobot · a 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 · a 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.

XCabbage · a 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.

Dead Comment

gadders · a year ago

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

briandear · a year ago

Free speech died when Covid came along.

20after4 · a 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.

sebstefan · a year ago

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

tartuffe78 · a 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 · a year ago

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

pavel_lishin · a 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?

that_guy_iain · a year ago

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

scarface_74 · a year ago

This doesn’t jibe with publicly available statistics..

bdangubic · a year ago

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

kcplate · a 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.

hallman76 · a 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.

mplewis · a 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.

JohnMakin · a 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 · a 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".

bongodongobob · a year ago

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

chickenfeed · a 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.

gadders · a year ago

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

honestSysAdmin · a 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.

bottled_poe · a 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.

(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 · a 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.

scarface_74 · a 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…

davidw · a 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 · a year ago

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

jasode · a 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.

heavyset_go · a 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.

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

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 · a 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 · a 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.

willywanker · a 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).

jaymzcampbell · a year ago

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

candu · a year ago

namenumber · a 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! :)

everybodyknows · a 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 · a 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 · a 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.

mattlutze · a 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.

tobinfekkes · a 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 · a 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.

SoftTalker · a 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.

fatline · a 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 · a year ago

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

dutchbookmaker · a 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.

declan_roberts · a year ago

This sounds like a fun hobby.

protocolture · a 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.

hedora · a 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?

EGreg · a 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 · a year ago

#YangGang

bzmrgonz · a year ago

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

tgirod · a 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.

BaudouinVH · a year ago

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

SiempreViernes · a year ago

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

1oooqooq · a 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

iLoveOncall · a 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 · a year ago

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

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

beisner · a 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 · a 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 · a 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 · a 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.

EyMaddis · a 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.