Before looking for a solution, have you checked with your community if there's even interest in an alternative? I have yet to meet a non-tech person that cares about this issue.
Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
151–160 of 401 posts
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#152May I suggest getting to know your community and understanding what their problems are before trying to change it.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#153Mate! I'm building exactly this! https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
Let me know if this is what you're after and you want some help setting up an instance.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#154> 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…
This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services out of concern for the long term stability or safety of that platform - you assumed their motives and turned it into a political statement right out of the gate.
> This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services
I disagree, GP's comment is typical of HN. The discussions you've mentioned do happen frequently, but surely you've noticed that at least half the comments (and often the top rated ones) will inevitably be "it can't be done so why even try".
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#155Does Nextdoor have anything useful for you? They have community events and so forth.
I don't know about your nextdoor, but my nextdoor is complete trash. Half the posts are people asking for trades people recommendations and the other half are "this [minority] person walked by my house twice, anyone know if they're a criminal?"
Community building on that platform seems like it'd be really difficult with it's current atmosphere.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#156I know someone who committed a misdemeanor and is on probation, one term of which is that he's not allowed to use "social media" (chat, etc.) although he can use plain ordinary web sites. This person made the mistake they did because of their social isolation and the probation officer is entirely supportive of his developing more face-to-face connection, but he finds it frustrating to find a poster for something like…
oh wow, this concept deserves its own post. Imagine emergency evacuation info being unattainable like this.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#157(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…
The first thing that comes to mind for me is
which is very much about community organizing but it has an aura of "people spreading rumors about bicycle thefts at the movie theater downtown (why don't they call the cops?)", the woman who radiates creepy signs of precarity (is cleaning up and looking for the phone number of the people who are suspected to run an illegal landfill) and then posts screen shots of the creepy come-ons she gets from guys who want to be her sugar daddy, etc.
Maybe there's a space for a platform that specifically targets small, community, in person kinds of organizations, maybe even targeted to a particular geographical area; something like Meetup but just a little less structured.
Here's a fair sized local organization (has more than one run a month) that has a good site
https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
But making that scalable is tricky; somebody in the club's leadership is a Wordpress pro. $5 a month would be cheap, but people are niggardly. If you're a web tech native owning a domain name is table stakes, but I think you'd lose 80% of "normies" even the phone-dependent "internet natives" if they had to get a domain name. There is a certain amount of panic over the breakdown of community organizations, see the line of research described in this film
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/join_or_die
and rather than getting $5 a month out of people who think they can't afford it, getting funding from somebody like the United Way (for a particular area) or the Knight Foundation might be a better idea.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#158There is a software that has a technopolitical project behind it called Decidim. It comes from the legacy of 15M - 2011 in Spain, where the organisers needed an alternative like the one you mention, and to have a ‘facebook of democracy’: https://tecnopolitica.net/en/content/white-paper-decidim. The Barcelona City Council made the project possible and now it has an international community with more than 400 organisations, including many local communities. Apart from being an open source and democratic project, it is a very mature product that has not lost the orientation of the spirit of its creation.
Decidim is a political social network that allows communities to have a free technology, with democratic guarantees and designed for the common good. While this technology can be installed with knowledge of Ruby on Rails and some knowledge of servers, so perfectly self-hosted, there are also organisations that offer it in SaaS format at a very competitive price. Also, you can federated differents Decidims:)
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. That was a reasonable stance historically. Only the government had real power to control speech. Now a tiny number of platforms have a huge amount of power. They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication.
Again, during the civil rights movement there was no social media and mainstream media. You use personal outreach and then you build up from there. There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc
> There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc
Which are now largely dependent on social media and the like to reach people.
Church's somewhat less so because they do have services that people physically go to. Most campaign and advocacy groups work online, and for some social media is their main focus. They have to go where people are.
Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Splitting hairs. If you use a platform nobody uses to try and change the world you won't change it just like if you tried to plant trees without using seeds.
The point is precisely that you don’t need a social networking platform to do something meaningful .
I don't think the author was talking about isolated change like planting some seeds.
Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.