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Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

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Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

#1

Post by madsohm »

Facebook's feed is nonfunctional. Only some people get notification, even though they have notification for all messages turned on. Only some get the newest posts in their main feed. Sometimes I do get notifications, but only long after an urgent message was posted.

Has anybody successfully moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

I'm thinking about neighbor conversations/events, daycare, kindergarten, kids' classmates, sporting communities, etc.

If so, where did you go? Did you build something yourself or do you self-host some open source project? Did you find a good paid alternative?

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

#3

Post by pseudocomposer »

muzani wrote: post #2

At this point, I'm so tempted to just write some mobile-first forum software or make an alt-reddit. Communities have so much value, but they barely exist anymore.

I built Jonline for this purpose. If you’d be interested in deploying it, I’d love to help. https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

#4

Post by al_borland »

I have a NextDoor account, which is made for the neighbor stuff. That said, I don’t manage a community on it and haven’t actually logged into it in over a year, so I can’t really speak to its quality. I did have to spend a lot of time turning off notifications, it is very noisy by default.

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

#5

Post by tracker1 »

There's lots of web-forum software out there... I like the FB group UX, but it's definitely gotten worse over time. I think the problem is network affect and notifications in general.

I've gotten to where I disable notifications on almost everything to the point I usually don't even see a lot of messages until I check myself.

I'm more inclined to write my own, but that feels like such a hit or miss proposal at this point.

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

#7

Post by gus_massa »

Most groups here in Argentina run on WhatsApp. You get like a hundred messages per day. Luckily someone pins the important messages, she deserves a medal.

Racket is using https://www.discourse.org/contact , but I'm not sure how civilian friendly it is.

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

#10

Post by chistev »

muzani wrote: post #2

At this point, I'm so tempted to just write some mobile-first forum software or make an alt-reddit. Communities have so much value, but they barely exist anymore.

Building it is the easy part, getting people to use it is the hard part. I built a HN clone for a client that was intended for entrepreneurship discussions, it didn't take off.
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