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

23 points by madsohm ↗ HN
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?

14 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread
muzani
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.
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.
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.

mooreds
We actually have an old fashioned email list. It's a Google Group, because Yahoo Groups shut down.
apothegm
Email works very well for this. I do wish my neighborhood association would move to a Google group, because right now it’s a massive CC list. Mail hosts tend not to like that very much, and it’s not the most privacy-minded solution.

Several other active communities I’m a member of are on mailing lists. The one that switched to a forum platform with email notifications of new threads died fast.

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.

rurban
Everyone older moved from Facebook to WhatsApp years ago. The youngsters went to Insta instead.
WorldMaker
Several of my once-Facebook groups have moved to Discord. The Discord business model seems relatively aligned to user-friendly in a free-to-start way that mostly scales with community interest (individuals self-selecting to Nitro; Nitro boots into a community), for the most part, today.

(There are doubts the current model survives the next step in investment rounds, an IPO, but we'll see.)

realityfactchex
There's no known truly superior alternative to Facebook Groups (and the original article is, obviously, not what it once was, anymore, either).

A lot of possible alternatives appear to come close, but none really satisfies it.

The area is very ripe for disruption.

bjourne
In the group I administer posts of many members always get stuck in the spam filter queue so I have to check it manually every day to let their posts through. It's painful. But it is the only thing that works for non-techie people. People 70+ just won't get used to slack or any other less dumb alternative.
gitbit-org
Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp are all good tools for this.
ted_bunny
Don't bother with Meetup. It is a sad ruin of what it used to be. They have enshittified at light speed.