Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#281

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #248

jasode wrote: post #95

>move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution To get better answers, you need to flesh out all the features of Facebook that your communities are using. E.g. Shared event calendars? Groups? Private Messaging? Video hosting for users to upload vids of community events? Live feeds? Etc. Look at the left side of navigation topics to help you enumerate and think abo…

I've seen projects go off the rails trying to replicate Facebook's features for their groups, so make sure that your minimum actually means minimum in your MVP. You can build out a million features for Facebook parity, but it doesn't mean much if you have low traction. There were also cases where a simple Wordpress (or whatever) site would have worked, but the owners went all in on replicating FB features, instead of…

More to the point, if, like Robert Putnam, you believe that the nation is on the verge of a civic crisis because of the breakdown of local organizations

https://www.joinordiefilm.com/

the goal is to get people to join clubs, so you want some kind of service which has a specific mission and the minimal part is important. You want to put blinders on your users. You don't want them to get served irrelevant ads and notifications. I'd consider this site

https://fingerlakesrunners.org/

which is basically a calendar of events that they host; they have forums but people aren't chewing the fat, they're having discussions that are focused around the events that

https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/

You don't have the horrific moderation problems that come out of "is it fake or not?" or "is this socially acceptable or not?" because the real question is "is this relevant to the events we put on?" in which case the problem of "your free speech is (in my view) your obnoxious behavior" which gets worse the more purposeless a site is.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#282

Post by jazzyjackson » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #224

zer8k wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are gonna stay upset for quite a while. The billion dollar election manipulation campaign spanning Reddit/Tiktok/Youtube/Television was extremely effective. It convinced a very, very specific kind of person that the by-the-numbers worst candidate in modern history was going to win in an absolute landslide. It will be years before these people realize how much the media was controlled from 2020-2024 specificall…

>being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis Do you mean the party who just used the inauguration to have a senior government member throw nazi salutes? The party whose presidents first actions included pardoning dozens of members of fascist groups? You can't really be choosing this moment to complain about calling these people nazis??

I was about to say Musk doesn't have an actual role in government but I guess an executive order has made DOGE real, by renaming US Digital Service the US Doge Service.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#283

Post by spencerflem » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #274

jfactorial wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "techno fascism" is a term people are using to describe tech company CEOs operating as unelected oligarchs embedded within the new US government. If you're looking for a better term, we could call it "technocratic anti-liberalism" to perhaps cover all the bases. People are attempting to describe the current situation in which the wealthiest humans in all of history are supporting an anti-liberal executive by…

I'd say categorically that fascism is not a helpful term to describe movements outside the 1900-1945 period in Europe. (e.g. Japan's movement was anti-colonial if anything, Tokugawa Japan would have been happy to be left alone to gaze its navel, if that wasn't possible it wanted the asia-pacific region as a buffer zone) Today it is "Keir Starmer is a fascist" (Sci-fi writer Charlie Stross), "the local people departme…

Elon Musk did a Nazi salute, live on stage, twice

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#284

Post by spencerflem » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #192

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.

Doing something personally is fine. But trying to convince an entire community to ditch something that works and is likely incredibly valuable to them to stick it to some billionaire you don't like is just wrong.

its not wrong - we should all ditch facebook

it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#285

Post by jf22 » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:30 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #244

jf22 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mincing words and splitting hairs again.

Words have meanings. Communication between humans, which you’re keenly defending, depends on a shared understanding of them. I haven’t commented on it until now, but in my view you’re splitting hairs by repeatedly creating your own definitions (e.g. defining what is “real” change or not; changing the definition of words you said; saying “improvement” is not “change”; misunderstanding “limited”). So your repeated accu…

Yeah, and mincing words to make a silly argument valid isn't communication, it's arguing for arguments sake.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#286

Post by latexr » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #278

latexr wrote: post #89

Are we talking 50k people per town ? So over a quarter of a million people in total, each with more connections to other people outside said towns? I applaud and encourage your chutzpah, but I’m not too optimistic about your prospects. Do you want to move your community out of Facebook, or does the community want to do it? Do they even agree with your reasons for wanting to move, or is it possible they actually agree…

> you only have one shot That is not true at all. Trying, failing, and trying again are part of any change or innovation. In fact, it's close to the truth that nobody succeeds the first time.

When you’re trying to move a significant mass of people from something that works to another platform for ideological reasons, you’ll be met with resistance. Every time you fail you’ll be met with more until you can move no one.

“Innovation” doesn’t matter at all here, that’s not in question in the slightest, you’re conflating concepts. I’m giving specific advice, not making a general statement.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#287

Post by wintermutestwin » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #234

I'd echo others that you probably won't succeed, but there is still an action you can take, which is to create new communities elsewhere. The success of newer social platforms like Discord is mostly people creating new groups there, rather than wholesale migrations. Facebook itself followed that pattern in earlier days.

Haha. discord is the only social app that would be worse for this purpose than facecrook.

That said, your main point is solid.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#288

Post by redserk » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #108

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.

> 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?

Most people don't care about the platform that's used if there's enough buy-in.

I was part of something similar a few years ago at a local makerspace. We were using Meetup.com for a while then someone relatively new suggested we try using Discord instead. There wasn't much of a convincing reason besides "let's try it", so a bit over half of the active people gave it a shot, and everyone else followed since that's where the activity was.

While a few people were initially grumbly over making a new account, there aren't many complaints now that we have bots to help with calendars and a bot to help us monitor equipment.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#289

Post by kcplate » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

I can’t fault for someone making the attempt for whatever reason but if the reason is tied to politics I think that it will fail. People ultimately attempting a platform shift for political reasons like this will find that most people are 1) simply not as dogmatic politically as the activist types that would propose a change like this even if they are “on the same team” and 2) people are unwilling to leave a system of comfort for a novel system that works even slightly differently to their comfort zone to essentially do the same thing.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#290

Post by hoten » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

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...

Wow, that misinterpretation of "you can't yell fire in a crowded theatre" is really something. Do you think that's a smoking gun that he's shamelessly manipulating the audience, or is he really that dense (or, I suppose to be fair... is it an honest mistake - we all have blind spots)?