Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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.

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.

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 managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.

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.

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).

   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.

> 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.