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Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#201

Post by chriswarbo »

XCabbage wrote: post #171
ADeerAppeared wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Instagram hides search results for 'Democrats'" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g32yxpdz0o

> While users who type "#Democrat" or "#Democrats" see no results, the hashtag "Republican" returns 3.3 million posts on the social media platform.

> By manually searching Instagram for "Democrats", rather than clicking on a hashtag, users are greeted by a screen reading "we've hidden these results".

> "Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content," it says.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#202

Post by pimlottc »

coldpie wrote: post #38
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…

You're correct, but this is quite a boring response. If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. It is an uphill battle, but I wish the OP luck all the same.

I wish them luck too! But you have to be realistic and understand your users. Their value are not necessarily your values. A new services must be clearly better for them to switch; just being "not Facebook" is not that compelling to the average person.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#203

Post by RegnisGnaw »

caycep wrote: post #200

This is salient given policy moves by the CEO. My thoughts: -most of what you need is basically something similar to Facebook Groups (nowadays, I bookmark Facebook Groups for the 3 groups I follow, and skip the main feed, which is basically all ads and random memes these days) -you need a platform with mass adoption - FB got it w/ free accounts back in the day, connecting old classmates or whatnot. So a new platform…

More question, how are you going to deal with SPAM and moderation?

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#205

Post by scarface_74 »

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.

It doesn’t matter what the poster believes. He is doing something for the benefit of a community that doesn’t care about whatever ideological battle he is trying to fight and inconveniencing them in the process

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#206

Post by pixl97 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #130
jklinger410 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

you're arguing local, short term benefits with global long term damage. Very near sighted, but an actual problem government, good governance, has struggled with absolutely. Part of the techno fascism is emerging because people are entirely easily manipulated with todays egg prices and not tomorrows suffering of human rights.

>you're arguing local, short term benefits

Whelp, we know which one is going to win then. An economic benefit now wins the vast majority of the time.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#207

Post by scarface_74 »

latexr wrote: post #167
jf22 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the author was talking about isolated change like planting some seeds. Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.

> isolated The whole thread is about limited and well-defined communities, not the world. What the OP wants is specifically “isolated”. > like planting some seeds Spending thirty years planting a 550 hectare forest and restoring wildlife to it is not “planting some seeds”. Please don’t be reductive. > Real change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Change is change. You don’t get to define someone’s life w…

50K people is a limited community to move to another platform???

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#208

Post by pixl97 »

coldpie wrote: post #132
robertlagrant wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Good question, let's try to answer it. Suppose OP believes they have a serviceable replacement in place. What arguments could they use to convince their communities to switch to it? Here's some ideas: - No ads. - Free, even for business-use. - No algorithm interfering with visibility. - It's usable by community members who do not have a Facebook account, for whatever reason. - Allows for more free-form content. - Mor…

Hello, it appears you've never even ran the most basic internet platform before in your life.

Simply put you have to ask the most important questions first, then build an app backwards from that

1) How will it be paid for

2) How will it be moderated.

So, you've already failed number one. You have no means to pay for it.

Then you failed number two. If it gains even a modicum of popularity it will be completely and totally over ran with spam.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#209

Post by tobyjsullivan »

coldpie wrote: post #38
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…

You're correct, but this is quite a boring response. If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. It is an uphill battle, but I wish the OP luck all the same.

   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.
- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#210

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

Let’s be honest, Nextdoor is about people seeing that a black person is suspiciously going into a home using their garage door opener, driving in their garage and using their key…
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