Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

[recvonline]

I want to move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution or any collaborators I can join to move something along?

EDIT: 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.

[jasode]

>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 about it: https://www.facebook.com/help/130979416980121/

Do you expect those ~50k to create new logins for the new platform? Or do they sign in with their existing "Facebook ID" to avoid hassle of new account creation? Do they need a phone app? If it's website only from the smartphone web browser, do you need web push for notifications? Facebook interaction with others has convenient lookup from the phones' contact listing. Web-only site doesn't have straightforward access to smartphone's address book (without PhoneGap). Etc.

If your communities are using a lot of those social networking features, it means trying to use Mastodon as a substitute for Facebook is going to be a very incomplete solution.

Of course, alternative solutions are not going to fully match Facebook but you still need to think of the threshold for a minimum viable feature set so your 50k users won't reject it.

[heavyset_go]

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 making sure users actually went to their new property at all.

[ecshafer]

> 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 an app because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President. You have an uphill battle, and at best you are going to shed a majority of users. Facebook is a popular platform, especially for those 30+ people in a small town that use local groups.

[lsllc]

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 along the lines of "but no-one I know is on Signal" etc. I ended up re-installing WhatsApp because I decided that the loss of contact with so many people was worse than any privacy worries I had at the time.

[coldpie]

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.

[ADeerAppeared]

> 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.

[20after4]

Facebook has gone to shit long before any controversy around the CEO's political posturing. The content/spam+slop ratio is pretty dismal at this point. I am sure a lot of people are ready to jump ship, given a viable alternative for even some subset of the features that they like.

For me personally, the only features that remain at all interesting on Facebook are Marketplace, Groups and maybe Events. Does anyone still use Craigslist? It was always terrible so I don't know if there is an alternative for Marketplace but Groups and Events aren't even done that well on Facebook so that seems like a reasonable place to start as far as an MVP.

[sebstefan]

Most people in the US have already quit that app, the battle's not that uphill. You're starting half up

[kcplate]

> 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.

[hallman76]

> because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President

OP didn't give say politics had anything to do with it. Let them nerd up if they want to.

Centralization around specific platforms has plusses and minuses. Having alternatives drives innovation.

[mplewis]

Everyone wants to move off Facebook. The platform is shit and its main job is to shovel posts you don't want to read at your face so you scroll past them and view more ads.

[JohnMakin]

This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services out of concern for the long term stability or safety of that platform - you assumed their motives and turned it into a political statement right out of the gate.

[chickenfeed]

We have local community groups on FB. One for our hamlet of about 50 houses. Some households refuse to join as they don't do Facebook. I only do Facebook because of the local group. I long ago gave up trying to fill those people in. It is somewhat of a pain.

[gadders]

"Hi everyone. I want to inconvenience hundreds of people because of my minority political beliefs."

[honestSysAdmin]

Rural USA is extremely distrustful and quick to show both that distrust and disdain towards any Silicon Valley based company. "Technology is bad" is the general sentiment. These are "fossil of America" places where privacy is highly valued.

This is just my anecdotal experience, overwhelming anecdotal data, and I won't mention the specific regions so as to maintain my respect for those regions by not "out"ing them for having their views.

[bottled_poe]

Exactly, is OP really the one who should be influencing others preferences? Most couldn’t give two shits about the technological perils that await them just over the horizon - and should you really be the one to inform them of those horrors? Just relax - and embrace the book of faces. The movement will be swift and relatively painless, mostly.

[candu]

(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 akin to every IT migration project ever: it always takes longer than you think, and is not always a linear process from "fewer people migrated" to "more people migrated".

It's also akin to community organizing: there is no substitute for actually talking to people about it, especially in the initial phases. Or: high-touch sales, where you may initially need to spend a lot of energy and time per person successfully moved over. The other common thing here is that you will hear "no" a lot, which is a valuable experience anyways (but will be frustrating).

Also: unfortunately, no one will care if it's self-hosted or federated, outside of niche tech circles. They will care about whether they can reach the people they want to reach, and whether the user experience is good or not. This is reality: talking about these points will not help you.

Some things you'll probably need to do:

- Identify a single credible alternative platform. - Identify specific groups of people who are willing to be early "de-adopters". For instance: a local youth group, a sports club, whatever. Ideally you are a part of this group already; you then have a much better chance. Businesses will likely say no, so you want community groups. - Within those groups, identify champions: people who care about the same thing you care about, and are willing to commit time and effort to help. - Together with your champions, build a toolkit that allows you to scale up your efforts. This may be guides on how to talk to people about the change - what works, what doesn't. This might be instructions for setting up a specific platform. It might be communications channels, leaflets / flyers for putting up in public places, whatever.

[PaulHoule]

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 screen shots of the creepy come-ons she gets from guys who want to be her sugar daddy, etc.

Maybe there's a space for a platform that specifically targets small, community, in person kinds of organizations, maybe even targeted to a particular geographical area; something like Meetup but just a little less structured.

Here's a fair sized local organization (has more than one run a month) that has a good site

https://fingerlakesrunners.org/

But making that scalable is tricky; somebody in the club's leadership is a Wordpress pro. $5 a month would be cheap, but people are niggardly. If you're a web tech native owning a domain name is table stakes, but I think you'd lose 80% of "normies" even the phone-dependent "internet natives" if they had to get a domain name. There is a certain amount of panic over the breakdown of community organizations, see the line of research described in this film

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/join_or_die

and rather than getting $5 a month out of people who think they can't afford it, getting funding from somebody like the United Way (for a particular area) or the Knight Foundation might be a better idea.

[namenumber]

One successful version of what you're asking about seems to be the Vermont based Front Porch Forum. They have gotten some press in the last year and there was this thread about them on hackernews a while back : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208506

Whether they'd be receptive to share their secret sauce and let a thousand Front Porches bloom is another question though, guess you could ask them! :)

[mattlutze]

Go low-tech and start printing a small local newspaper.

Pay for it with ads from local businesses, and give it away for free at all those stores. Get your regional Chamber of Commerce to help set you up with connections and sales channels.

[tobinfekkes]

We have one of these small little local magazines that prints every two weeks with all the local events and stories and humor. It's free (paid for by ads for local businesses), and delivered in bundles to all the local outfits.

At first, I thought it was a little bit silly to start a print magazine in 2020, but honestly, it's amazing and everyone loves it. I look forward to each new edition. And they become hard to find cause people grab them so quickly!

Huge hit, highly recommend. But remember: it's a huge hit not because it's a print magazine; it's a hit because the execution of the couple that manage it. They're top-notch, and it's a "hobby" for them, not their main jobs.

[coffeefirst]

My neighborhood has a guy who runs a small blog/newsletter. It's pretty good! They do roundups on new businesses, events, schools, talks to the city council rep from time to time, and has a generally positive community vibe.

Because it has an editor (and you could break the work up amongst a few people) you don't have the same problems that listservs have (spam) or nextdoor (gossip and paranoia).

Substack or mailchimp would be fine for v1.

If you don't want to distribute something on paper or cover any costs, this is a fine place to start.

[SoftTalker]

Yes, do this and learn firsthand why all the small-town newspapers are gone. Printing, paper, and distribution is expensive, and nobody will pay enough for print ads anymore to cover the costs.

[fatline]

local newspaper with an online version. You can then use the online version to try to use to hook the people into some alternative online platform for the community (a mailing list, a forum, something more advanced)

[dutchbookmaker]

Every even mid sized US city use to have a Village Voice knock off free paper but even the Village Voice went under almost 8 years ago.

I use to love these artsy free papers but even my elderly parents don't read the local newspaper anymore that grew up reading the paper.

The local paper is a very small niche item at this point.

The only way I can think to do this is to hang old school flyers in an area of the city/town that attracts the people you want in your community.

[declan_roberts]

This sounds like a fun hobby.

[protocolture]

Add to this:

Organise the newspaper on the new platform, advertise it on both.

If all the complainers have to move to the new platform to complain, or chat about it adjacent to you thats where they will end up.

[hedora]

Or, just mail a copy to everyone once a month. I don’t think 50K mailers costs all that much these days. Maybe start smaller? 5K?

[EGreg]

I know I’ve been posting this a few times over the past few months, but I haven’t started promoting it yet to the world.

This is a hard problem because people expect real-time chat, videoconferencing, livestreaming, privacy controls, proper notifications, profiles, photo uploads and much more.

I have spent over a decade building essentially an open-source Facebook that can federate in more interesting ways than Mastodon, and can support Matrix protocol and much more etc. It has all those features I mentioned out of the box, and is completely open-source.

Short answer, watch this:

https://qbix.com/communities

Or just look at these PDFs:

https://qbix.com/community.pdf

https://qbix.com/alumni.pdf

Longer answer, read this: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

We use it to serve our own local communities:

Here is the code: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Or if you want, contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com and I can help set it up for you.

[qntmfred]

#YangGang

[tgirod]

Maybe have a look at mobilizon : https://joinmobilizon.org/en/

Never had the opportunity to test it, but it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft as an alternative to facebook for community/event organization. Might fit the bill for you.

[beisner]

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.

[nzoschke]

I’ll second Partiful.

Their use of good old fashioned www links and SMS messages makes it easy for everyone to share and join events. No app and no Partiful account necessary.

They also have simple and good event privacy model, group scheduling, reminders, Venmo based ticket system, and group chat.

It’s taken over almost completely in my social circles and I’m all for it.

[dangoor]

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

[EyMaddis]

I can throw my site Partey.io into the mix. Works without VC backing for free (I run it and it’s cheap for me). No need to expose your phone number, an invite is just a link you can share.

[Stronico]

I run a discussion group that meets once a month - our tech stack is 1. A blog running WordPress that I use to announce meetings 2. A meetup.com account (free tier) that has the same information as the blog 3. A MailChimp account (free tier) where I send notices about the meetups 4. A very active Slack group (free tier) where I announce meetups and we have entended discussions. Discord would probably work just as well.

I've never used Facebook for anything, but the above four tools work very well for us.

[paarals]

There is a software that has a technopolitical project behind it called Decidim. It comes from the legacy of 15M - 2011 in Spain, where the organisers needed an alternative like the one you mention, and to have a ‘facebook of democracy’: https://tecnopolitica.net/en/content/white-paper-decidim. The Barcelona City Council made the project possible and now it has an international community with more than 400 organisations, including many local communities. Apart from being an open source and democratic project, it is a very mature product that has not lost the orientation of the spirit of its creation.

Decidim is a political social network that allows communities to have a free technology, with democratic guarantees and designed for the common good. While this technology can be installed with knowledge of Ruby on Rails and some knowledge of servers, so perfectly self-hosted, there are also organisations that offer it in SaaS format at a very competitive price. Also, you can federated differents Decidims:)

[inanutshellus]

* Look into Diaspora. (https://diasporafoundation.org/). Upside: It's basically a self-hosted facebook. Really cool project. Downside: Unlike facebook, there's no fake/pushed content so it tended to feel stale.

* Look into hosting a forum (e.g. phpBB). Forums are excellent because they don't lose old information like facebook does. When someone says "Hey what's the policy on dogs?" three years later I can search "dogs" and find the answer. Downside: They're not pretty, not full of pictures and no infinite scrollingz. sadge alfababies. Kidding aside, if you do try a forum, be sure to not offer a bunch of niche subtopics. The more subtopics the more stale the forum feels overall. Just stick to one main topic until someone asks for a second.

* IRC chat. I hosted an IRC group for several years at work and it worked great. We only killed it when we decided to move to an enterprise communication app.

[amelius]

> Downside: Unlike facebook, there's no fake/pushed content so it tended to feel stale.

It would be cool if they had a scraper that could pre-populate the system with some content from Facebook.

[mooreds]

We have a local email list. Hosted on google groups, but I suppose you could use a tool like https://groups.io/ or self-host as well.

[teeray]

Came here to suggest groups.io as a mailing list. I use it for my HOA--we need timely notifications (trash pickup delays, parking bans, etc.) and a lot of folks don't have (or want) Facebook. It has solid moderation tools, apps if you want them (you don't need them), and some useful bonus features (calendars, polls, wikis, docs, etc.) if you find yourself needing them.

[mig39]

I run a few community groups using Discourse. It's great because there's a mode where you can make it into a type of listserv/forum hybrid. If people are more comfortable in e-mail, they can use that. If they want to use their web browser, they can use that. Works great on mobile. Easy to self-host.

[hkt]

There are a few I'd recommend:

Loomio - this is usually for coops, especially decision making, but last I checked works well as a forum.

Lemmy - federated reddit alternative.

Discourse - the forum we know and love.

Flarum - decent alternative to discourse.

The challenge with all these is moderation: Lemmy solves it best by having subreddit style division of labour, with moderation per "board". Discourse supports trusted users if memory serves, and I'm not sure about the others.

I'm pretty sure discourse and Lemmy also support eg, log in with google/facebook/etc which eases onboarding a lot.

Personally, I'd go with Lemmy. It is less mature than discourse but probably more suited to your purposes.

[weberer]

>I want to move our local communities

What does that mean? I think we need a lot more context on what you want to do. Are you the IT administrator for the county and want to find alternative ways of disseminating announcements? Or are you just a citizen that wants people to chat somewhere else?

[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.

[scarface_74]

Your issue is going to be that people don’t want to keep track of yet another platform.

You may be able to get away with the free tier of Slack.

[nitwit005]

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.

[yurishimo]

It depends on what kind of community you want. Something like Facebook Events, I haven’t really seen a successful alternative for.

If you just want a discussion board, Discourse is self-hostable and people might be familiar with it from other companies. I’d argue it’s not a very normie-friendly platform however and out of the box, I find the notification defaults quite annoying. Maybe admins can change that, but most of the communities that I’m a part of do not.

[pluc]

Website to announce and register interest, mailing list or blog to post. You can send your website updates to Facebook for the first few months then kill it once everyone is on board.

[diggan]

Yeah, simply write some .html, .css and .js files, just `scp` it over to your VPS and then easily setup Mailman with systemd. Easy peazy :)