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Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#101

Post by talldayo »

coldpie wrote: post #98
underdeserver wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is where his community is, and it's good enough for them. Why would anyone move? What possible hope does he have of overcoming the network effect and convincing people to move to something they don't know? (And is most likely - for their use case - a worse experience)

Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.

There are a lot of justified, boring reasons to not do something. I despise Facebook, but I'm also not going to waste my time trying to convince my cohorts to use a self-hosted federated alternative. You have to be blindly foolish to even hold out the slightest hope that these people will use an alternative, and I say that as a Mastodon user/apologist.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#102

Post by hkt »

There are a few I'd recommend:

Loomio - this is usually for coops, especially decision making, but last I checked works well as a forum.

Lemmy - federated reddit alternative.

Discourse - the forum we know and love.

Flarum - decent alternative to discourse.

The challenge with all these is moderation: Lemmy solves it best by having subreddit style division of labour, with moderation per "board". Discourse supports trusted users if memory serves, and I'm not sure about the others.

I'm pretty sure discourse and Lemmy also support eg, log in with google/facebook/etc which eases onboarding a lot.

Personally, I'd go with Lemmy. It is less mature than discourse but probably more suited to your purposes.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#103

Post by wnolens »

fatline wrote: post #99
mattlutze wrote: post #86

Go low-tech and start printing a small local newspaper. Pay for it with ads from local businesses, and give it away for free at all those stores. Get your regional Chamber of Commerce to help set you up with connections and sales channels.

local newspaper with an online version. You can then use the online version to try to use to hook the people into some alternative online platform for the community (a mailing list, a forum, something more advanced)

This seems awesome actually. And a practical path in a small place. Print --> Online --> Online Community

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#104

Post by coldpie »

talldayo wrote: post #101
coldpie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.

There are a lot of justified, boring reasons to not do something. I despise Facebook, but I'm also not going to waste my time trying to convince my cohorts to use a self-hosted federated alternative. You have to be blindly foolish to even hold out the slightest hope that these people will use an alternative, and I say that as a Mastodon user/apologist.

Okay.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#105

Post by candu »

(Disclaimer: I've never tried to move large numbers of people off of Facebook; I have organized community groups from scratch before, and I have led initiatives at work that consisted largely of convincing people to do a thing. Much of this advice is from that perspective. YMMV.)

So: my advice is to not think of it as all-or-nothing. You will not be able to move 300k people off of Facebook overnight. This is somewhat akin to every IT migration project ever: it always takes longer than you think, and is not always a linear process from "fewer people migrated" to "more people migrated".

It's also akin to community organizing: there is no substitute for actually talking to people about it, especially in the initial phases. Or: high-touch sales, where you may initially need to spend a lot of energy and time per person successfully moved over. The other common thing here is that you will hear "no" a lot, which is a valuable experience anyways (but will be frustrating).

Also: unfortunately, no one will care if it's self-hosted or federated, outside of niche tech circles. They will care about whether they can reach the people they want to reach, and whether the user experience is good or not. This is reality: talking about these points will not help you.

Some things you'll probably need to do:

- Identify a single credible alternative platform. - Identify specific groups of people who are willing to be early "de-adopters". For instance: a local youth group, a sports club, whatever. Ideally you are a part of this group already; you then have a much better chance. Businesses will likely say no, so you want community groups. - Within those groups, identify champions: people who care about the same thing you care about, and are willing to commit time and effort to help. - Together with your champions, build a toolkit that allows you to scale up your efforts. This may be guides on how to talk to people about the change - what works, what doesn't. This might be instructions for setting up a specific platform. It might be communications channels, leaflets / flyers for putting up in public places, whatever.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#106

Post by zdragnar »

latexr wrote: post #67
jf22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.

Tell that to Jadav Payeng, who planted a forest by himself. He accomplished, on his own, more for the good of the world than most communities on Facebook ever will. https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...

Rural Facebook communities aren't trying to change the world. They're there for light conversation, gossip and organizing get-togethers.

It's important to note that Jadav didn't get other people to change and join his crusade before it happened. He merely went out and did what he wanted. People were inspired by seeing it happen.

People aren't going to be inspired by yet another social network touting federation and other technical mumbo-jumbo, because it doesn't help them do anything they weren't already doing on Facebook.

This whole conversation is very strange to me indeed.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#107

Post by hedora »

mattlutze wrote: post #86

Go low-tech and start printing a small local newspaper. Pay for it with ads from local businesses, and give it away for free at all those stores. Get your regional Chamber of Commerce to help set you up with connections and sales channels.

Or, just mail a copy to everyone once a month. I don’t think 50K mailers costs all that much these days. Maybe start smaller? 5K?

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#108

Post by robertlagrant »

coldpie wrote: post #98
underdeserver wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is where his community is, and it's good enough for them. Why would anyone move? What possible hope does he have of overcoming the network effect and convincing people to move to something they don't know? (And is most likely - for their use case - a worse experience)

Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.

> Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle

No, most people don't care about having this battle - that's the point. If there's no demonstrable reason to leave (e.g. "former president got banned from major platform, so go to new platform") then the - valid, if personally boring to you - point is: how will you persuade people to leave it?

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#109

Post by jf22 »

bee_rider wrote: post #73
jf22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.

We could communicate more effectively 20 or so years ago. Communication technology had already matured, but we didn’t have these engagement-driven social media platforms. The goal of these platforms isn’t to communicate, it is to sell ads and pick engaging posts to re-broadcast. What gets people engaged is stupid anger. Even stuff I agree with on some fundamental political level, the social media version is just stre…

Sure, but if nobody is on the platform or other end of the line, who cares?

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#110

Post by jf22 »

latexr wrote: post #67
jf22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.

Tell that to Jadav Payeng, who planted a forest by himself. He accomplished, on his own, more for the good of the world than most communities on Facebook ever will. https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...

Eh, that's improvement, but the world didn't change because of a small forest.
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