alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
Most people in the US have already quit that app, the battle's not that uphill. You're starting half up
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"Hi everyone. I want to inconvenience hundreds of people because of my minority political beliefs."
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.
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.
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.