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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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.
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.
'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.
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.
> 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.
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
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
Sorry I don't have time to look if a good solution exists, but you have to check out framalibre by framasoft. Half the apps they recommend don't really work out of the box, but the rest is pretty good, and everything can be self-hosted.
https://framalibre.org/ (it's french only, sorry)
Good luck!
If you 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.
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!
If you're adventurous, you could try:
It's early alpha - here's the story behind it:
Check out options on https://softaculous.com/apps/socialnetworking. I have used Elgg, and HumHub seems popular.
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.
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...
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.
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
>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.
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).
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.
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?
Well, do your community want to move off facebook?
Im in the same situation, in my rural area everything happens through local facebook groups. If you are not there, you will not get party invitations , voice calls etc
I'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.
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).
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.
The activitypub based pixelfed servers are open source and give an Instagram like experience. And there is the advantage that it can federate with outside fediverse feeds too
Why 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).
Why not Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org/
You need a private subreddit. Do not use nextdoor, we do admin there and it's just constantly fending off racist garbage.
Find an open-source social media project.
Set it up.
Send the URL to your neighbors.
See who joins. Might take off, might (probably) not. But seems to me that's basically it.
Could a Patreon or Medium or Subspace page work for this? Announcements, mailing list, even a payment system for beer money
Band app: https://band.us
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.
Does Nextdoor have anything useful for you? They have community events and so forth.
You might want to move, but do all ~49,999 other people share the same view?
WhatsApp groups are big in the UK, I think you can do QR join codes.
There's always phpBB (old school) or Discord (new school).
There are a couple commercial options in this space.
Example: mightynetworks.com
This seems like a great way to splinter your community.
Craigslist is still very active and very much a thing.
discourse is nice: https://mixpeek.com/community
depends on what experience you want... a lot of communities exist on just a chat app like whatsapp (europe mostly), line (east asia), etc
Unless they all want to... You can't.
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
Knocking on a door and actually talking with people. Barring that a ham bbs that geographically covers your tegion.
What about Idealist.org?
What about a subreddit?
Lu.ma is great.
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