Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?
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.
400 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadYou may be able to get away with the free tier of Slack.
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.
This is like the hobbyist version of resume driven development.
But the better question is, what is the purpose of getting off of Facebook? Are the users asking for it?
Especially now that Zuck has kissed the ring, conservatives (ie rural small town folks) are not trying to flee Facebook now if they ever were.
The downside is that to get more of a Facebook community experience with a calendar, files, and subgroups, you will probably have to pay for for the Premium level. https://groups.io/static/pricing
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.
This is enough to tell me it's not gonna be suitable.
Their software are all absolutely awful because their organization follows the skewed principle that FOSS is enough to "sell" and they don't take UX into consideration at all.
Literally none of their alternatives are successful, always for this reason.
that will drain users from Facebook instantly! i can already see the flood of people coming. /s
Communities are made of people, do you think they'd be willing to move?
In the UK at least, a recent ofcom ( Communications regulator ) report suggested that 76% of people reported using WhatsApp in the previous 3 months.
This is close enough to the 83% of people who reported making a phone call in the past 3 months that you can consider "everyone" to have WhatsApp in the same way you'd consider everyone can make phone calls. Yes, there are notable exceptions you may have to accommodate for or be prepared for if necessary, but you can by default assume everyone has it on their phone.
If OP's objection is to Meta, then of course don't use WhatsApp. But if the objection is Facebook as a platform then a message group may be suitable.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/internet-based-services/technology/...
Also, door to door salesmen don't tend to go to rural areas.
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.
Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?
Agreed. Also not everyone realizes WhatsApp and IG are also part of Facebook. Aside from elderly folks, almost now one I know uses traditional facebook. However, almost all Millenials and GenZ I know use IG. Practically everyone I know who has overseas family/friends uses WhatsApp.
Also see https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... just for kicks :)
maybe i sound like i'm wearing a tin hat but i don't totally trust their active user numbers or believe that facebook is growing active users in the US. like am i in there bc i have a facebook acct from years ago to run ads and accidentally clicked a fb link once last year? what if i viewed a facebook ad. at some point somebody is deciding what counts as active and i'd bet a dollar that person is incentivized for numbers to be big and monotonic.
in my experience it's good to poke at numbers that don't match your intuition. that's how you get to reality.
i know your example was farcical, but if you know a lot of people and 100% of them play racquetball, you should seriously question someone who is telling you that football is actually the most popular sport, especially if they have economic incentives for you thinking that's the truth. it's just math.
it is not their numbers :)
i have a facebook acct from years ago to run ads and accidentally clicked a fb link once last year?
you won't count
in my experience it's good to poke at numbers that don't match your intuition. that's how you get to reality.
except what you are doing is not looking at numbers but drawing from either your personal experiences or "oh, I've heard no one is on facebook these days"
always follow the money - investors would RUN FOR THE HILLS if Facebook was what you are thinking Facebook is. maybe this will be different in 10+ years when boomers die off and GenZ, GenA are in their "prime" but at this point Facebook is the ruler of social media
"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.
Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. You can set up your own site and set up your own servers if need be. People have been getting their ideas out there before social media and even when the mainstream media wouldn’t cover them.
That’s how the civil rights movement came to prominence.
That was a reasonable stance historically. Only the government had real power to control speech.
Now a tiny number of platforms have a huge amount of power. They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication.
You use personal outreach and then you build up from there. There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc
Which are now largely dependent on social media and the like to reach people.
Church's somewhat less so because they do have services that people physically go to. Most campaign and advocacy groups work online, and for some social media is their main focus. They have to go where people are.
Absolute bullshit. It has never been easier in history to publish your own thoughts for the consumption of anyone who is interested in reading them. You can make your own website and put just about whatever you want on it. You can write and publish pamphlets or books with print on demand services. You can record audio or video with your phone and put it on your website or just send it directly to people. You can walk down to the town square and say pretty much whatever you want.
You absolutely don't need to be on Facebook or Twitter or ANY social networks to exercise your free speech. None of these companies has power over any means of communication other than their own platforms. You don't have to use their platforms.
Yes, but you can reach far fewer people if you do not.
This is well on the way to arguing that you are free to say what you want in a sealed room.
Your argument seems to be that the New York Times has no choice but to publish my op-ed, because otherwise how will anyone find it?
The NYT is a publication, social media are platforms.
You have to put in the work. Major changes happen by people getting thier voice out before social media
But they did not have to compete with social media. There are more third spaces (as is often discussed on HN) and local ways to get started.
So long as you do it in a sound proofed room.
It will be years before these people realize how much the media was controlled from 2020-2024 specifically in favor of one political party. For a lot of people this was the first time it was extremely obvious and going back to Bush and Obama social media and the internet in general weren't considered "serious" political campaign locations. I certainly dont remember either Bush's or Obama's election being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis. Of course there was vitriol but it was so tame compared to today.
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??
And that paragraph would not be objectionable to many people in that political grouping.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
https://theconversation.com/tech-billionaire-elon-musks-soci...
"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."
Except that’s not what he said. He was asked about the NY Post story (which Facebook never actually blocked, they only — briefly — blocked it from “trending”), and Zuckerberg very carefully worded his answer to say something that was already known, but which people not listening carefully might think revealed something new:
But the fact that the FBI had sent out a general warning to all of social media to be on the lookout for disinfo campaigns like that was widely known and reported on way earlier. The FBI did not comment specifically on the Hunter Biden laptop story, nor did they tell Facebook (or anyone) to take anything down."https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...
Got any sources that don't go in for such blatant gaslighting?
I already posted the link refuting this nonsense with sources
(You may be right about the government "pressure" being grossly overstated, I dunno. But the censorship itself happened.)
Citing Shellenberger, laughable
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
(Right? I have no insider information, here, but as far as I understand it none of the above is controversial.)
I don't know the exact content of the messages the FBI sent (I don't think they've been published), but on its face it seems perverse to me to characterise that sequence of events as the FBI not saying "anything about the Hunter laptop story" to Facebook. They presumably were referring to the Hunter laptop story, and Facebook correctly recognised that this was the case when the story broke, so in what sense are was the warning not "about" that story?
> While users who type "#Democrat" or "#Democrats" see no results, the hashtag "Republican" returns 3.3 million posts on the social media platform.
> By manually searching Instagram for "Democrats", rather than clicking on a hashtag, users are greeted by a screen reading "we've hidden these results".
> "Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content," it says.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...
It's important to note that Jadav didn't get other people to change and join his crusade before it happened. He merely went out and did what he wanted. People were inspired by seeing it happen.
People aren't going to be inspired by yet another social network touting federation and other technical mumbo-jumbo, because it doesn't help them do anything they weren't already doing on Facebook.
This whole conversation is very strange to me indeed.
Because you’re not engaging with the point?
For starters, the original claim was to “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Beyond that, the point of my reply was to show that it is indeed possible to make the world better without communicating with anyone else (contrary to the original claim).
Anything else is your own addition.
And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.
If you use a platform nobody uses to try and change the world you won't change it just like if you tried to plant trees without using seeds.
Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.
The whole thread is about limited and well-defined communities, not the world. What the OP wants is specifically “isolated”.
> like planting some seeds
Spending thirty years planting a 550 hectare forest and restoring wildlife to it is not “planting some seeds”. Please don’t be reductive.
> Real change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Change is change. You don’t get to define someone’s life work, which was more meaningful and impactful than most of us will ever achieve, not “real” to fit your narrow definition.
If we were discussing everyone who has lived and will ever live, the current population of the world would be a limited snapshot. Same if we were discussing every planet and civilisation in the fictional world of Start Trek.
But we’re not discussing that. Making up something we’re not talking about to attack what we are is called a straw man argument.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781581
What you’re arguing against is not the point I was making. My point in this thread is way up there: it replies to someone saying you cannot make the world better without communicating with other humans, by presenting someone who on their own improved the world more than most (if not all) Facebook groups ever will.
When I used the word “limited”, it was clearly in reference to it being an “isolated” specific community and not everyone.
I don’t think it’s worth either of our times to continue, though. We’ve strayed too much from the original point.
A good evening (or your equivalent time of day) to you.
What gets people engaged is stupid anger. Even stuff I agree with on some fundamental political level, the social media version is just stressed out, to the point of being ineffective and often wrong in detail.
Centralized as driven social media can’t go out of business fast enough.
Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.
Of course it's debatable because reality can be measured in multiple dimensions.
Is it faster, yes. Is filtering out the massive amounts of bullshit communications easier? Not really, especially with content aware spambots than can be ran by the millions. It's easy to get crushed by bullshit asymmetry. For me this makes most communications less effective because I have to spend even more time figuring out the actual poster and their motivations.
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.
I use it for parent stuff and parties. It just does what it supposed to. See pictures of kids (private group). Get birthday invites. Just go to the group. No algorithm or engagement farming. It just works.
And marketplace has been a game changer.
What's better? Simpler to setup and maintain for local businesses or daycares. One daycare used a different app and it was awful. Janky, weird, missing features and the teachers complain about it.
A better world is subjective.
Yeah, obviously. So part of the OP's task will be selling their communities on why switching away from Facebook is a good thing. Given everything that's going on, now is a good opportunity to do that. But before they can do that, they need to know what to switch to, which is the topic of this thread.
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?
- No ads.
- Free, even for business-use.
- No algorithm interfering with visibility.
- It's usable by community members who do not have a Facebook account, for whatever reason.
- Allows for more free-form content.
- More choices for content delivery format & notifications (say, email, text message, newsletter links).
Maybe you can come up with some. What would you find to be a convincing argument to switch to a community-owned organization platform instead of Facebook?
Honestly if it really would just need to cover the price of the cheapest hosting you can find and the domain registration a single small-to-medium Adsense ad in the sidebar might generate enough to cover it. I don't know how many impressions/pageviews it takes to generate $20 but it can't be that many.
I run some meetup groups, and still pay for it for now, but the price hikes and other charges they're adding are onerous. I know many groups who have shutdown, and I know of some other players wanting to get in to this space to take over from meetup.com. $10/month to run a smallish group is affordable for a lot of folks. $50/month is not. $300/year is just not worth it to many folks, but... $99/year would be. Meetup seems to be moving in to some weird 'hyper optimize for short term revenue' move, which makes me think they'll be gone or acquired/dismantled in the next 5 years.
Simply put you have to ask the most important questions first, then build an app backwards from that
1) How will it be paid for
2) How will it be moderated.
So, you've already failed number one. You have no means to pay for it.
Then you failed number two. If it gains even a modicum of popularity it will be completely and totally over ran with spam.
There are things you should not try as you can easily deduce that they are not rooted in any reality, e.g. "free" and "no-ads"
The internet is a horrifically hostile place. If you design a product without that in mind you're creating a danger for yourself and for your users. Slap a community site up without thinking about COPPA or GDPR or whatever Californian law and suddenly you'll have problems. Slap a site up without heavy moderation and it will be filled with the most awful porn you can imagine.
It's not about just accepting the way things the way the are, it's avoiding becoming a casualty of the way things are.
That is also true of every advance society makes: Most people are happy the way they are. It's an obstacle every innovator and leader faces. Yet somehow, we make changes and advances.
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.
It might happen again. :)
it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned
This is kind of a cost-benefit issue though. The benefits of having a local community outweigh the negatives of the platform having its own issues.
If your issues on the platform cause you to ditch it, which ruins your community, than what have you actually done?
I believe when it comes to anything that is not-for-profit, that the path of least resistance the only path. Therefore moving off of Facebook is simply not a consideration.
Very near sighted, but an actual problem government, good governance, has struggled with absolutely. Part of the techno fascism is emerging because people are entirely easily manipulated with todays egg prices and not tomorrows suffering of human rights.
I keep hearing this. What does this mean?
My guess would be "a system in which big technology firms can effectively censor speech with coordination from the state". But I think those that use it mean something else.
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 making financial donations to anti-liberal leadership and making changes to their products to further the messages thereof, e.g. broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.
"Wealthy" as in "holding more personal wealth than the bottom half of the US population"; "anti-liberal" as in "espousing and acting in opposition to classical liberal values of consent of the governed and equality under law by denying the validity of elections, attempting to overthrow the US liberal democratic government with force, pardoning foot soldiers found guilty of such an attack, utilizing king-like executive direction to undermine the highest law of the land, avoiding all punishment for his own guilt, and so forth.
That's how I interpret the term.
Today it is "Keir Starmer is a fascist" (Sci-fi writer Charlie Stross), "the local people department is fascist" (BLM supporters), I half expect to hear "Jesus was a fascist" although certainly that accusation is leveled at his followers.
There's something seductive about the imagery in Pink Floyd's The Wall and V is for Vendetta that is evocative of the period. Perhaps today's political systems are on the brink of failure due to inaction the way that the remnants of European aristocracy were. But we're not going to face what we're up against using "thought stopping" terms.
One could make the case that the real problem with "people worried about the price of eggs" is a lack of meaning and that Trump's talk about going to Mars or annexing Greenland addresses that more directly, as do the fantasies of fascism which can elevate ordinary feelings of despair.
As for Musk, I think he's mentally ill, I think he may have what I've got.
Our language is bending as it ever does to help people explain these political shifts—often people who see what's happening but don't have much education on the matters of history, political science, philosophy. Bear in mind that 21% of US adults are illiterate, and far fewer are even equipped to read, say, Thomas Paine.
We need ways of talking about the values that are winning (nationalist theocratic autocracy) and the ones that are not (the open society, secular liberal democracy), and the word "liberalism" in the US has beenn so tarnished, so I think "fascism" today has come to mean "anti-liberal." I'll take what I can get.
> Over 90% of political donations from employees at major tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have gone to Democrats since 2004.
> In 2020, 90% of contributions from the internet industry went to Democrats, while only 9% went to Republicans.
> However, there are signs of a slight shift in recent years:
> In 2024, 15% of donations from employees at major tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta went to Republican causes, up from 5% in 2020 and 8% in 2018.
It sounds like your definition is "a few visible billionaires donated to someone I don't like"
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.
Look, I get it. You have your politics and that's fine. But if you want to win hearts and minds, try another strategy. It's all just so exhausting and people check out.
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes
This is a fact, not a rhetorical device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany
Musk — one of the most powerful people in Washington — doing things like throwing a sieg heil salute, supporting the AfD, claiming that "Hitler was a communist,"[1] and calling for the execution of a government witness[2].
Thiel proclaiming to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and then half of Silicon Valley showing up to party with him[3].
Techno fascism is what it says on the tin: technologists who are very happy with fascism for the sake of money and power. (Just don't call them fascists, they hate that.)
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leade...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42773678
Whelp, we know which one is going to win then. An economic benefit now wins the vast majority of the time.
Thus you must convince users that 1) FB is clearly inferior to your product (e.g. many important hidden demerits) or 2) your product adds something essential that's absent in FB. Otherwise, why switch?
I disagree, GP's comment is typical of HN. The discussions you've mentioned do happen frequently, but surely you've noticed that at least half the comments (and often the top rated ones) will inevitably be "it can't be done so why even try".
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.
Heck, we see this with Mastodon and Bluesky, their content is very thin in my experience (even if Twitter's is also thinner than it used to be at least with the mostly tech-related content I followed).
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.
What might actually be cool would be a common set of design principles that become used across many apps and ecosystems - it would make switching much easier.
People are already used to the little "hamburger menu" three dots thing in UI (can also be three lines) often in the upper right for better or worse
Most people did not, in fact learn how to use computers http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
Signal takes many seconds to render the main window. Telegram opens in a reasonable amount of time.
Chat bubbles in signal reveal some hidden icons when you hover them, but have a separate right click menu when you click them. You basically have to guess which of both menus contains the action that you need.
Copy paste of images often doesn’t work on Signal. The voice clip button does nothing. It simply doesn’t work, but doesn’t show any errors or log anything.
I want to like Signal, but the clients are simply terrible, have bad UX and are full of bugs.
Signal desktop takes 4 seconds to launch for me. That's a bit slow, but I launch it at boot and leave it open all the time.
I see a ... menu when I hover over messages in a chat; its contents are identical to what I see right-clicking the message.
Copy/paste of images into and out of chats works for me. The voice clip button works for me.
I'd be annoyed if I ran into a bunch of client bugs like these too, but they do sound like bugs rather than bad design. If you haven't used it in a while, they may be fixed.
It’s of course not trivial but one has to wonder if there’s something there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook is used for a lot of notification/scheduling at my local game store though. I refuse to use Facebook, but don't want to be a burden on everyone else. I found some people I like and gave them my phone number and told them I'm down for a game whenever they are. Although rare, I have gotten a text before and gone and had fun.
Anyone have bright new ideas on this angle?
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.
v4 now fully federates, has always been self-hostable, and is a great piece of software for migrating from Facebook.
Consider the "feed" plugin for a less jarring experience. Push notifications via the "web-push" plugin.
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! :)
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.
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
> 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.