Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
407 points by recvonline a month ago
407 points by recvonline a month ago
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.
>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. I've seen projects go off the rails trying to replicate Facebook's features for their groups, so make sure that your minimum actually means minimum in your MVP. You can build out a million features for Facebook parity, but it doesn't mean much if you have low traction. There were also cases where a simple Wordpress (or whatever) site would have worked, but the owners went all in on replicating FB features, instead of making sure users actually went to their new property at all. More to the point, if, like Robert Putnam, you believe that the nation is on the verge of a civic crisis because of the breakdown of local organizations https://www.joinordiefilm.com/ the goal is to get people to join clubs, so you want some kind of service which has a specific mission and the minimal part is important. You want to put blinders on your users. You don't want them to get served irrelevant ads and notifications. I'd consider this site https://fingerlakesrunners.org/ which is basically a calendar of events that they host; they have forums but people aren't chewing the fat, they're having discussions that are focused around the events that https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/ You don't have the horrific moderation problems that come out of "is it fake or not?" or "is this socially acceptable or not?" because the real question is "is this relevant to the events we put on?" in which case the problem of "your free speech is (in my view) your obnoxious behavior" which gets worse the more purposeless a site is. The best feature of FB is reach. You can't replicate that without a global social media platform. So don't. Just build local communities that thrive _despite_ the fact they are started on FB. More in-person social interaction might upend FB and social media, but we currently play this game so these are the rules we must follow. It's reach and UX. Normies can use it. People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Mailing list, Usenet, IRC, are all now dead because no one could invest to UX in these early open protocols. In theory you can reach all users using a mailing list but oh boy, good luck with that one, unless all of your peers are kernel developers. > People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Most of us miss the simplicity of mailing lists. I lived in a new (at the time) neighbourhood back in 2008, and we had a neighbourhood mailing list which was very convenient. Nobody had issues with using it, because there’s very little to learn if you know how ti read and reply emails. Sure, we had to explain “reply to one” vs “reply to all” to a few people, but that’s entirely it. Mailing lists fell out of fashion because of marketing and trends, not because of any inherent limitations. Are there any Mail list servers i can use to organise a local sports group. Using Google map right now but it’s terrible Mastodon is a Twitter clone, nowhere comparable to Facebook. An endless microblogging format may not be ideal for a local community, as compared to a regular forum (which is just one of the many features Facebook offers). This is such a great answer. You've given me flashbacks to many zoom meetings that started with "Can't we just...". > 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. 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. I managed to get people over to Telegram. Signal was a no go. It’s still a bit inconvenient. Mobile only unless you link a desktop is a non starter for me period. Majority of people don’t care about e2ee. They want an easy to use app that syncs everything and doesn’t require reading a manual. I actually started with Telegram, then there was some "don't the bad guys use that?" so Signal it was ... Bad guys can and will use any platform that preserves privacy... but the default unsecured policy of Telegram was a bigger concern to me and the dread of having to request all contacts to enable end-to-end encryption (the instant messaging equivalent of having to explain to grandma why she should use pgp keys for privacy of her email communication). Sad you got downvoted. Signal UX is 100x worse than Telegram and I probably can calculate it to prove this exact number.
I’m dreaming about Telegram client and Signal-like openness. I have used both Signal and Telegram for years and I'm not seeing much UX difference. What's better for you on Telegram? Right clicking on a conversation on signal does nothing. On telegram is shows the menu that if expect. Signal takes many seconds to render the main window. Telegram opens in a reasonable amount of time. Chat bubbles in signal reveal some hidden icons when you hover them, but have a separate right click menu when you click them. You basically have to guess which of both menus contains the action that you need. Copy paste of images often doesn’t work on Signal. The voice clip button does nothing. It simply doesn’t work, but doesn’t show any errors or log anything. I want to like Signal, but the clients are simply terrible, have bad UX and are full of bugs. The only one of these I'm seeing is that there's no right-click menu for conversations in the desktop client, which does slightly violate my expectations. As to everything else: Signal desktop takes 4 seconds to launch for me. That's a bit slow, but I launch it at boot and leave it open all the time. I see a ... menu when I hover over messages in a chat; its contents are identical to what I see right-clicking the message. Copy/paste of images into and out of chats works for me. The voice clip button works for me. I'd be annoyed if I ran into a bunch of client bugs like these too, but they do sound like bugs rather than bad design. If you haven't used it in a while, they may be fixed. To be fair, Signal has gotten a lot better and a lot easier to show people how to sign up. Back when I did my migration off FB Messenger it was a different story and Telegram was basically on par with Messenger My initial Signal onboarding was long enough ago that I don't remember it. I do remember some general unreliability about eight years ago, but it's been solid during the past five. Several nontechnical people I've recommended it to during the past five years needed zero handholding. I have often wondered why nobody takes the open source clients for Telegram and experiments with swapping the backend, so to speak. It’s of course not trivial but one has to wonder if there’s something there. You won't get folks to move, because people tend to "stay stuck." Us tecchies (typical HN members) literally can't imagine what non-tech people go through, when encountering tech. It's terrifying, humiliating, and intimidating. The reaction from us techs, does nothing to help, as we tend to sneer at them, and do everything we can, to humiliate them. Fairly typical bullying, but we don't want to admit it, because we were always bullied, and don't want to admit that we are just doing the same to others. Most folks painfully learn rote, then get terrified of changes. This is why so many folks don't want to upgrade, or add new features. Just learning the ones they have mastered, was difficult enough. They can't deal with doing it on a regular basis (like most of us tecchies do). Until we accept this, and keep it in mind, when we design solutions, we won't get much traction. People who do understand it, and design for it, tend to make a lot of money. This is also why we need to introduce changes S L O W L Y, even when we feel that it doesn't make sense. Basic human empathy. It's kinda rare, these days. I had hoped the generations that grew up with the internet would learn how to use computers. Technical advantages like encryption and social advantages like federation tend to make things more complicated to use no matter how much effort is put into UX. Most people did not, in fact learn how to use computers http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... Agreed What might actually be cool would be a common set of design principles that become used across many apps and ecosystems - it would make switching much easier. People are already used to the little "hamburger menu" three dots thing in UI (can also be three lines) often in the upper right for better or worse I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal. Yeah, my gut is that of those 30K people on Facebook you might get a few hundred to join a new platform. But maybe not. It probably won't be very useful without the other 29K people plus (even if a lot of those are probably not very active). Heck, we see this with Mastodon and Bluesky, their content is very thin in my experience (even if Twitter's is also thinner than it used to be at least with the mostly tech-related content I followed). Yep, and this is what I have been telling people that the reason why Trump won is because the right cares much more about their agenda than the left. It's all just surface level virtue signaling for the left, which they will drop immediately if they get a good discount on a local mirror in a city group.
On the other hand, be openly LGBT friendly and see if a Trumper comes to buy from your store. Not a single one will. 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. More precisely, that unreasonable man must add sufficient extraordinary value to his product to convert complacent users into willing defectors. Thus you must convince users that 1) FB is clearly inferior to your product (e.g. many important hidden demerits) or 2) your product adds something essential that's absent in FB. Otherwise, why switch? > If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. This is kind of a cost-benefit issue though. The benefits of having a local community outweigh the negatives of the platform having its own issues. If your issues on the platform cause you to ditch it, which ruins your community, than what have you actually done? I believe when it comes to anything that is not-for-profit, that the path of least resistance the only path. Therefore moving off of Facebook is simply not a consideration. you're arguing local, short term benefits with global long term damage. Very near sighted, but an actual problem government, good governance, has struggled with absolutely. Part of the techno fascism is emerging because people are entirely easily manipulated with todays egg prices and not tomorrows suffering of human rights. > techno fascism I keep hearing this. What does this mean? My guess would be "a system in which big technology firms can effectively censor speech with coordination from the state". But I think those that use it mean something else. Big tech leadership cheerily cozying up to an authoritarian president, felon, and rapist who started an insurrection and literally tried to overthrow the last election. Musk — one of the most powerful people in Washington — doing things like throwing a sieg heil salute, supporting the AfD, claiming that "Hitler was a communist,"[1] and calling for the execution of a government witness[2]. Thiel proclaiming to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and then half of Silicon Valley showing up to party with him[3]. Techno fascism is what it says on the tin: technologists who are very happy with fascism for the sake of money and power. (Just don't call them fascists, they hate that.) [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leade... [2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... A lot of really smart people in the 1930's were also really into eugenics and forced sterilization and so on. Hitler had a lot of support, even in the US, for what he was doing openly. Being smart doesn't prevent you from being an asshole. Only being empathetic does, and you don't have to be smart to be empathetic. I think "techno fascism" is a term people are using to describe tech company CEOs operating as unelected oligarchs embedded within the new US government. If you're looking for a better term, we could call it "technocratic anti-liberalism" to perhaps cover all the bases. People are attempting to describe the current situation in which the wealthiest humans in all of history are supporting an anti-liberal executive by making financial donations to anti-liberal leadership and making changes to their products to further the messages thereof, e.g. broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes. "Wealthy" as in "holding more personal wealth than the bottom half of the US population"; "anti-liberal" as in "espousing and acting in opposition to classical liberal values of consent of the governed and equality under law by denying the validity of elections, attempting to overthrow the US liberal democratic government with force, pardoning foot soldiers found guilty of such an attack, utilizing king-like executive direction to undermine the highest law of the land, avoiding all punishment for his own guilt, and so forth. That's how I interpret the term. I'd say categorically that fascism is not a helpful term to describe movements outside the 1900-1945 period in Europe. (e.g. Japan's movement was anti-colonial if anything, Tokugawa Japan would have been happy to be left alone to gaze its navel, if that wasn't possible it wanted the asia-pacific region as a buffer zone) Today it is "Keir Starmer is a fascist" (Sci-fi writer Charlie Stross), "the local people department is fascist" (BLM supporters), I half expect to hear "Jesus was a fascist" although certainly that accusation is leveled at his followers. There's something seductive about the imagery in Pink Floyd's The Wall and V is for Vendetta that is evocative of the period. Perhaps today's political systems are on the brink of failure due to inaction the way that the remnants of European aristocracy were. But we're not going to face what we're up against using "thought stopping" terms. One could make the case that the real problem with "people worried about the price of eggs" is a lack of meaning and that Trump's talk about going to Mars or annexing Greenland addresses that more directly, as do the fantasies of fascism which can elevate ordinary feelings of despair. I agree with you about trying to avoid thought stopping terms, and the desire for more specific language in important topics. It's tempting to think that history repeats itself, but it doesn't. It really doesn't. Historians will find ways of comparing and contrasting one moment with another, but whatever is happening right now is not determined by any historical law playing out. Our language is bending as it ever does to help people explain these political shifts—often people who see what's happening but don't have much education on the matters of history, political science, philosophy. Bear in mind that 21% of US adults are illiterate, and far fewer are even equipped to read, say, Thomas Paine. We need ways of talking about the values that are winning (nationalist theocratic autocracy) and the ones that are not (the open society, secular liberal democracy), and the word "liberalism" in the US has beenn so tarnished, so I think "fascism" today has come to mean "anti-liberal." I'll take what I can get. To me the more defeatist part here was the claim that OP shouldn't even try moving off Facebook, than using "techno fascism" as a shorthand for the situation we're all familiar with in a reply arguing going the path of least resistance (going along) is destructive in the long run. Elon Musk did a Nazi salute, live on stage, twice They told General McArthur when he was getting a tickertape parade to never hold his hand higher than heart level otherwise people would accuse him of making a Nazi salute. As for Musk, I think he's mentally ill, I think he may have what I've got.
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- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
the unreasonable man.
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