alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
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.
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> 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.
(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.
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.
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! :)
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.
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.
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.
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:)
* 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 [email protected] and mention this post.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook, specifically each and _every_ "feature" it implements, is certainly not the only way to "organize local communities" using a computer network. Remember that Facebook is ultimately designed to serve advertisers not community organisers. Advertisers are the customers.
I 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.
https://Hylo.com is trying to be that alternative, they're not federated yet (longer-term goal i think) but they are open-source.
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?
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.
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.
A WhatsApp group might well be an easier alternative for many people, although it's another Meta company if that's a concern.
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)
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?
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.
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.
Yup. Same situation. I suspect same motivation. Interested in collaboration.
I've never used this before but you can try:
2i2wbyza4 at mozmail dot com
Or suggest a contact method.
I 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.
The obvious Fediverse alternative for Facebook is https://friendi.ca
It federates with Mastodon and co.
Some statistics: https://fedidb.org/software/friendica
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.
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.
Good old fashioned email listservs are always an option.
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
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
Band app: https://band.us
I've had some success with Humhub. Writeup here: https://www.shareddigitalguides.org.uk/guides/social-network...
The only alternative I can think of that all of your community probably already have is email. Set up an email mailing list and lock it down so only members of your community and those invited by your community can use it. Despite the wishes of some here email will never go away and will be used by anyone communicating with businesses.
For your bonus criteria email can be self hosted but that's a more complicated topic as it pertains to mailing lists. At least a couple people in your community should be at list technical enough to follow internet examples. Mailing lists are federated per the spirit of the definition as they can each use their own existing email provider.
> I 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.
>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.