Craigslist is still very active and very much a thing.
Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
11–20 of 401 posts
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#12Knocking on a door and actually talking with people. Barring that a ham bbs that geographically covers your tegion.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#13Maybe have a look at mobilizon : https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ Never had the opportunity to test it, but it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft as an alternative to facebook for community/event organization. Might fit the bill for you.
> it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft This is enough to tell me it's not gonna be suitable. Their software are all absolutely awful because their organization follows the skewed principle that FOSS is enough to "sell" and they don't take UX into consideration at all. Literally none of their alternatives are successful, always for this reason.
Framapad, Framacalc and Framadate are used quite a lot around here.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#14> 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.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#15I've had some success with looking at meetup.com and finding when some kind of group is going to meet up somewhere, show up, and see if things click. I played some board games recently and then got added to the weekly text notification and now have some adults to chill with when I have an opening on that day.
Facebook is used for a lot of notification/scheduling at my local game store though. I refuse to use Facebook, but don't want to be a burden on everyone else. I found some people I like and gave them my phone number and told them I'm down for a game whenever they are. Although rare, I have gotten a text before and gone and had fun.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#16Website to announce and register interest, mailing list or blog to post. You can send your website updates to Facebook for the first few months then kill it once everyone is on board.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#17A WhatsApp group might well be an easier alternative for many people, although it's another Meta company if that's a concern.
Whatsapp belongs to Meta. A group on Signal would be entirely outside the Zuckerberg-verse.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#18Somehow some way, the end game needs to be entities curating space they own (websites) and syndicating out to platforms for reach/engagement. Indieweb has the fundamentals, but no path nor intention for broad uptake.
Anyone have bright new ideas on this angle?
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#19I know I’ve been posting this a few times over the past few months, but I haven’t started promoting it yet to the world.
This is a hard problem because people expect real-time chat, videoconferencing, livestreaming, privacy controls, proper notifications, profiles, photo uploads and much more.
I have spent over a decade building essentially an open-source Facebook that can federate in more interesting ways than Mastodon, and can support Matrix protocol and much more etc. It has all those features I mentioned out of the box, and is completely open-source.
Short answer, watch this:
Or just look at these PDFs:
https://qbix.com/community.pdf
Longer answer, read this: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
We use it to serve our own local communities:
Here is the code: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Or if you want, contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com and I can help set it up for you.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#20Does anyone know a tool to form groups on AT protocol? Maybe custom feeds? That would be a great feature! I’ve been meaning to look into it for a while.