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Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#291

Post by kaikai »

I live in a small community that relies on Facebook, and I would be shocked if you could get people to switch. You might get a few, but the network effect is strong enough that most will stay on Facebook.

One alternative is an old-school email list. We have one run by a single older woman, who refuses any form of updates or help. If she’s sick, emails don’t go out. If you want to sign up, you need to ask her. Still, it’s easy for people to use on a variety of platforms, uses minimal data, doesn’t have any tracking, and doesn’t have ads. The longer-form, slower nature of email makes it less likely to devolve into drama like the local Facebook groups do.

Even if you do self-host something decentralized, you need it to be reliable without you. If you succeed and your community relies on it, you’re doing them a disservice by not making it a reliable even if your circumstances change.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#292

Post by RealityVoid »

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…

The best feature of FB is reach. You can't replicate that without a global social media platform. So don't. Just build local communities that thrive _despite_ the fact they are started on FB. More in-person social interaction might upend FB and social media, but we currently play this game so these are the rules we must follow.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#293

Post by gadders »

blactuary wrote: post #129
gadders wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo "Mr Zuckerberg also said his firm briefly "demoted" content relating to Joe Biden's son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 election, after the FBI warned of "a potential Russian disinformation" operation. It later became clear that this content was not part of such an operation, Mr Zuckerberg said, and it should not have been temporarily taken down."

"Two and a half years ago, he went on Joe Rogan and said that the FBI had warned the company about the potential for hack and leak efforts put forth by the Russians, which Rogan and a whole bunch of people, including the mainstream media, falsely interpreted as “the FBI told us to block the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Except that’s not what he said. He was asked about the NY Post story (which Facebook never actually…

"So, first, calling it “censorship” is misleading, because it’s just how you handle violations of your rules, which is why moderation is always a better term for it."

Got any sources that don't go in for such blatant gaslighting?

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#295

Post by blactuary »

XCabbage wrote: post #260
blactuary wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those claims are false, and Facebook's own internal communications showed that they did not censor any covid-related content. SCOTUS ruled that the govt asked them to filter out misinformation without putting any undue pressure on them, and Facebook declined to do so I already posted the link refuting this nonsense with sources

No? So this whole section on Wikipedia is just false? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Facebook#COVID-1... (You may be right about the government "pressure" being grossly overstated, I dunno. But the censorship itself happened.)

Yes, it is false

Citing Shellenberger, laughable

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#297

Post by darknavi »

dangoor wrote: post #199
beisner wrote: post #45

For events specifically, my cohort (somewhere between Gen-Z and Millenial) have moved event organizing entirely to Partiful, which I've found to be far superior to Facebook Events. Doesn't help with group posts though.

Any idea what the business model is? It seems like they might have group organizing features now, but I'd be concerned about adopting it for a group without a clear idea of how they're going to make money

From Google:

> Partiful does not make money yet. They are a venture-backed startup with many millions of dollars of funding. They will eventually offer a premium version, an ad-supported model, or be acquired by a larger company like Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Snapchat, or one of these other potential acquirers.

Basically, enjoy it while you can. There is nothing wrong with using a free service like this while you can. Best case IMO is that they monetize it with low fees and have a product that is actually worth paying for.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#298

Post by blactuary »

XCabbage wrote: post #257
blactuary wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI did not say anything about the Hunter laptop story to Facebook, they warned all social media companies that they had detected suspicious activity and that the companies should be aware of foreign disinformation ops The laptop story was always nonsense anyway, because the chain of custody of the laptop was compromised, and forensic analysis of the hard drive showed that the contents had been modified after it…

Oh, come on. No, per the reporting, they didn't specifically mention the laptop, but they DID tell SM and tech companies to expect an imminent disinformation dump the week before the NYP published their story (which they'd been sitting on while working on verifying it), and gave enough of a characterisation of what that specific impending dump would contain that employees of the warned companies sent each other messa…

They didn't tell them to censor anything, they warned them that misinformation was coming, and FB on their own decided to temporarily suppress it from "Trending" before changing their mind. You're free to read all of the evidence. Zuck lied and tried to conflate the Instagram bug with the laptop story and/or the COVID stuff

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#299

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lsllc wrote: post #222
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…

This. After WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook (this predates any of the current political stuff, it was entirely about privacy), I tried to get friends and family to switch to something else -- Signal in fact as iMessage was a no-go because of the lack of Android support. Out of ~30 people, I got precisely 3 people to switch. No one else cared, no one else wanted the hassle of switching. I even got a few comments alo…

You won't get folks to move, because people tend to "stay stuck."

Us tecchies (typical HN members) literally can't imagine what non-tech people go through, when encountering tech.

It's terrifying, humiliating, and intimidating. The reaction from us techs, does nothing to help, as we tend to sneer at them, and do everything we can, to humiliate them. Fairly typical bullying, but we don't want to admit it, because we were always bullied, and don't want to admit that we are just doing the same to others.

Most folks painfully learn rote, then get terrified of changes. This is why so many folks don't want to upgrade, or add new features. Just learning the ones they have mastered, was difficult enough. They can't deal with doing it on a regular basis (like most of us tecchies do).

Until we accept this, and keep it in mind, when we design solutions, we won't get much traction. People who do understand it, and design for it, tend to make a lot of money.

This is also why we need to introduce changes S L O W L Y, even when we feel that it doesn't make sense.

Basic human empathy. It's kinda rare, these days.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#300

Post by blactuary »

XCabbage wrote: post #260
blactuary wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those claims are false, and Facebook's own internal communications showed that they did not censor any covid-related content. SCOTUS ruled that the govt asked them to filter out misinformation without putting any undue pressure on them, and Facebook declined to do so I already posted the link refuting this nonsense with sources

No? So this whole section on Wikipedia is just false? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Facebook#COVID-1... (You may be right about the government "pressure" being grossly overstated, I dunno. But the censorship itself happened.)

Also, "this whole section on Wikipedia is just false?" is a very funny sentence
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