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> For many communities there's simply no alternative to FB right now. Make one. Work on it. Why would someone else make it for them/you for 'free'?

by pmlnr 11y ago

viraptor 11y ago
Why should I? That alternative is FB, without bad rules. Facebook already won with features and has approximately all the people already registered. From the communities I know, nobody would consider switching to a different service. It would just be a worse FB with fewer people on it.
- pmlnr 11y ago
  It sounds like you've never been a part of a forum or similar a decade ago. It's usually much better with less people. For the why: because a, monopoly is bad; b, Facebook is broken on too many levels.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    Yes I have. It works for tech communities. It works for topic discussions. It works for many things. What it would completely fail for is a worldwide group of people who have a lot of personal connections between them, organise and announce semi-public events (100s a year), have local groups (1000s), and share a lot of information within one of those relationships. Also ~100% of them are already on FB and successfully do all of the above. So again, no. Monopoly is bad, Facebook is bad/good depending on use case, sure. But this is not possible to migrate to a forum. Very simplified situation exists for developers - with the personal part reduced and with very limited local groups you have this information spread over twitter / local boards / meetup.com / etc. anyway. If I wanted to check events in some area, it's actually not trivial. It would be also a complete pain to centralise. You know what I do for the other use case? Post to facebook, share it in a group that's approximately in the same area in the world, and I get all information I need in a few minutes / hours: links to specific groups, specific events, and if needed I've got FB messenger contact to people who posted it.

> For many communities there's simply no alternative to FB right now. Make one. Work on it. Why would someone else make it for them/you for 'free'?

by pmlnr 11y ago

> For many communities there's simply no alternative to FB right now. Make one. Work on it. Why would someone else make it for them/you for 'free'?

viraptor 11y ago

Why should I? That alternative is FB, without bad rules. Facebook already won with features and has approximately all the people already registered. From the communities I know, nobody would consider switching to a different service. It would just be a worse FB with fewer people on it.

pmlnr 11y ago
It sounds like you've never been a part of a forum or similar a decade ago. It's usually much better with less people. For the why: because a, monopoly is bad; b, Facebook is broken on too many levels.
- viraptor 11y ago
  Yes I have. It works for tech communities. It works for topic discussions. It works for many things. What it would completely fail for is a worldwide group of people who have a lot of personal connections between them, organise and announce semi-public events (100s a year), have local groups (1000s), and share a lot of information within one of those relationships. Also ~100% of them are already on FB and successfully do all of the above. So again, no. Monopoly is bad, Facebook is bad/good depending on use case, sure. But this is not possible to migrate to a forum. Very simplified situation exists for developers - with the personal part reduced and with very limited local groups you have this information spread over twitter / local boards / meetup.com / etc. anyway. If I wanted to check events in some area, it's actually not trivial. It would be also a complete pain to centralise. You know what I do for the other use case? Post to facebook, share it in a group that's approximately in the same area in the world, and I get all information I need in a few minutes / hours: links to specific groups, specific events, and if needed I've got FB messenger contact to people who posted it.