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Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#191

Post by blactuary »

XCabbage wrote: post #168
blactuary wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said here is false

No, it is true and has been covered in all major newspapers many times over. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored due to warnings from the FBI, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that Facebook was pressured by the Biden administration to censor Covid-19-related content.

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 was retrieved from the repair shop and so the content could not be trusted

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#192

Post by bko »

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#194

Post by briandear »

bee_rider wrote: post #73
jf22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.

We could communicate more effectively 20 or so years ago. Communication technology had already matured, but we didn’t have these engagement-driven social media platforms. The goal of these platforms isn’t to communicate, it is to sell ads and pick engaging posts to re-broadcast. What gets people engaged is stupid anger. Even stuff I agree with on some fundamental political level, the social media version is just stre…

Communication was more effective 20 years ago? I remember using a Skypager when I was a Reuters journalist. I also remember processing film in bathrooms at news events then having to scan negatives using a suitcase-sized scanner and computer and it being 30-60 minutes to get photos onto the wire. Now it’s instant.

Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#195

Post by briandear »

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.

Free speech died when Covid came along.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#196

Post by Zolomon »

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.

We all helped our families and loved ones to ditch MSN for Google Talk for Skype for WhatsApp for Discord etc.

It might happen again. :)

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#198

Post by bko »

bee_rider wrote: post #73
jf22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.

We could communicate more effectively 20 or so years ago. Communication technology had already matured, but we didn’t have these engagement-driven social media platforms. The goal of these platforms isn’t to communicate, it is to sell ads and pick engaging posts to re-broadcast. What gets people engaged is stupid anger. Even stuff I agree with on some fundamental political level, the social media version is just stre…

I think you're mixing a few things here. There's social media (TikTok, Instagram, X, viral crap) and then there's social media (organize parties, facebook marketplace, Whatsapp, etc).

They may share a technology platform, but they are not the same.

If you have children you'll see social media (#2) is incredibly useful and facilitates greatly in communication. We're much more connected than our parents were thanks to these apps.

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#199

Post by dangoor »

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

Re: Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

#200

Post by caycep »

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 would need to be free for average users

-simple signup - single "Server" - i.e. can't have the weaknesses of individual forum server software or even mastodon/federated solutions (not enough users, hard to setup)

-some way to monetize - i.e. the sins of Facebook can be traced (in part) to reliance on ads to monetize. so maybe charge for admins who want to set up their own group? It would be be an order of magnitude less income than Facebook but maybe sustainable if you keep the scope of such a site/service small.

The younger gen these days use a lot of discord, older gen uses slack, but the way they are set up with individual "servers" seems clunky to me, and no web interface but it's relatively close.

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