alt Hacker NewsIt is crazy to me that a lot of towns have literally switched to engaging people on FB. Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB. Often people who are not even members of the community comment and see those posts. Towns can't delete comments.
I cannot wait until this whole FB trends ends. I want RSS feeds or blogs. Businesses should have their own basic websites that serve their needs.
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I work in wildland firefighting.
Those comments you mentioned are a bit of a problem. Whenever admin complains about them I always say, "You're using Facebook. What do you expect? Only retired people, idiots, and bots are on there."
They never seem to understand what I'm talking about because, unfortunately, most of the folks in wildfire admin are 50+ years old
I'm no fan of FB, but the problem is deeper than FB. If FB vanishes overnight, some other service will take its place, and the same people who posted on FB will post on whatever the new website/service is.
Yes, it would be nice if FB fades into obscurity. But what would be nicer is if people had some basic decency and responsibility (everyone, me included) before posting clickbaity, flammable, junk stuff. I have no clue how to achieve this, but the internet used to be a fun place (for learning, niche topics/ideas etc) - those days are gone, and it sucks
> Not only are they at mercy of FB, but there are a lot of insane people on FB.
A fair number - not all - I am convinced are foreign trolls, or bots. There's something which just feels a bit different from a normal partisan, and the kinds of folks who invade every regional (town, county, etc.) group and post nonstop partisan dreck. Their profiles are off in some way, and the hours they are posting are all over the map.
FB does have the "big tent" thing going on, where they wanted to become the tool for every possible organizing principle. So you do get some of the legitimately most wacky people on the internet as well.
AT Proto has a chance to really help here, so that governments and other orgs and publish structured content like posts and events, and have them indexed and distributed through all kinds of AT Proto services and apps, including, but not limited to Bluesky.
I hope to see turnkey organization oriented PDSes that let an admin management multiple accounts, and also host web pages with the same content that's distributed on network. Then gov posts has a web home and can be subscribed to in AT Proto apps.
It’s slowing changing though
My friend groups are all moving to Partiful to plan events for example because so many of us are getting off Facebook
Not the same as town level engagement obviously, but a sign the audience is moving
>Towns can't delete comments.
Ehhh, good? Should you be able to remove my comment here just because it's a child of yours?
Sharecropping is bad for sharecroppers, what a surprise.
This may not be the best place for this, but I run forth.news -- we publish primary sources, like releases/alerts from governments. (IPAWS -- the emergency alert system -- for example, is here: https://www.forth.news/lists/ipaws)
If there are PIOs/PAOs here who are looking for a new place to share alerts (for free), I'd love to chat. Our audience is growing quickly, and we can be a replacement for Facebook/Twitter/any other site making it more difficult for constituents to read alerts.
jared (at) forth (dot) news