alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
How many people in rural America are going to be familiar with Discourse? And if the end goal is to have a discussion forum and you are trying to meet the needs of the people, why would they care about it being self hosted and what happens when the original poster gets board?
This is like the hobbyist version of resume driven development.
But the better question is, what is the purpose of getting off of Facebook? Are the users asking for it?
Especially now that Zuck has kissed the ring, conservatives (ie rural small town folks) are not trying to flee Facebook now if they ever were.