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Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#171

Post by XCabbage »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #35
ecshafer wrote: post #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…

> because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President. "Engaging in political censorship of their platform in favour of the President" is a little more than being "friendly". Free Speech in the US is dying. Ignore it at your own peril.

Huh? When has Facebook ever implemented political censorship on behalf of Trump? I am not aware of a single case of such a thing even being requested, let alone granted. The scandals about government-directed social media censorship were under Biden's admin, not under Trump's.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#172

Post by javier123454321 »

blactuary wrote: post #125
gadders wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did, and has said so publicly: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo

He did not, and if you follow the actual facts and read the internal communications you find out he lied https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#173

Post by coffeefirst »

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.

My neighborhood has a guy who runs a small blog/newsletter. It's pretty good! They do roundups on new businesses, events, schools, talks to the city council rep from time to time, and has a generally positive community vibe.

Because it has an editor (and you could break the work up amongst a few people) you don't have the same problems that listservs have (spam) or nextdoor (gossip and paranoia).

Substack or mailchimp would be fine for v1.

If you don't want to distribute something on paper or cover any costs, this is a fine place to start.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#175

Post by davidw »

PaulHoule wrote: post #157
candu wrote: post #105

(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 https://nextdoor.com/ 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 sc…

I wonder if a subreddit would work?

Nextdoor dot com is actually even more toxic than a lot of Facebook is and I would avoid at all costs.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#178

Post by geor9e »

My local communities are on (in order of popularity): facebook, telegram, discord, facebook messenger, signal. Some attempted to migrate to mastodon and bluesky but those were all failures, since getting a large and diverse group to sign up for something new is a herculean task. You just need one popular poster to refuse to leave a platform for everyone to refuse to leave. I personally just use burner accounts under my hamsters name for everything, lock down my permissions, use an RSS reader to see all my groups and friends facebook posts without having to visit (feedbro, all posts set to public).

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#179

Post by rcpt »

PaulHoule wrote: post #157
candu wrote: post #105

(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 https://nextdoor.com/ 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 sc…

There are local Craigslist forums if Nextdoor isn't weird enough for you

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#180

Post by hombre_fatal »

I'd first figure out how much of it is something you want to do vs. something everyone wants to do.

There's a content creator I follow that proudly moved from Youtube to their own Peertube instance. Even though I like their content, I never run into it anymore. Every couple months I think "oh yeah, I should check on them" and manually navigate to their Peertube instance and watch half a video.

Make sure you aren't dooming the community.

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