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Slightly off topic but... my social circle grew concerned about our privacy some years ago and some of us, including myself, really didn't want to continue usin

Slightly off topic but... my social circle grew concerned about our privacy some years ago and some of us, including myself, really didn't want to continue using a 'private' Facebook group. After a fair bit of trial and error we wound up using a vanilla Discourse image on some AWS provider. It's turned out to be the best think we've done for our friendships in decades.

yoavm 8y ago
Can you share more on how you use it?
- Quequau 8y ago
  I'm not a web guy so I'm not 100% familiar with the details but as far as I understand it's nothing more than a vanilla Discourse image from an outfit called bitnami running on the smallest instance available on Amazon... and absolutely nothing else. Presumably it's what discourse looks & acts like before people wrap their business logic / webpage around it.
  - yoavm 8y ago
    oh I didn't mean from the technical aspect. I meant socially, how it works. What kind of things your friends post there, how often you go check what's up with them, with type of discussions you have there etc'.
    - Quequau 8y ago
      I don't use any other social media. So I post everything that pops into my mind, news that I read elsewhere, things that go in my life, and often stuff that's much more personal than I would have ever posted anywhere else. The discussion is much the same as what I suppose people have on Facebook, Instagram or whatever... though it's orders of magnitude more civil and reasonable. Roughly half the group has also abandoned all other social media, while the other half occasionally act as a Facebook diode by posting worthy or important things they might come across. As the group now lives in several different countries on different continents, having a mechanism that helps us work around time zone constraints which isn't an unmanageable tangle of email chains is hugely beneficial. It's remarkable how making things easier to keep track of wound up facilitating a lot more discussion. Also as it's just us we have no constraints concerning thread life cycles. So when something occurs that relates to our discussion in some ancient thread it's not a problem to revive it. So we've got threads that run over the course of five years.
      - jtrtoo 8y ago
        How much do the connections between the people in your friend group overlap? How do you deal with people you're connected with but not necessarily others in the group? Just thinking out loud. Thanks for sharing!
        Quequau 8y ago
        Everyone in the group has known each other since the late seventies, we just don't live in the same places anymore. It's just us and, except for a couple of deaths, the group hasn't changed size in a couple of decades. We haven't and wouldn't invite anyone else.

yoavm 8y ago

Can you share more on how you use it?

Quequau 8y ago
I'm not a web guy so I'm not 100% familiar with the details but as far as I understand it's nothing more than a vanilla Discourse image from an outfit called bitnami running on the smallest instance available on Amazon... and absolutely nothing else. Presumably it's what discourse looks & acts like before people wrap their business logic / webpage around it.
- yoavm 8y ago
  oh I didn't mean from the technical aspect. I meant socially, how it works. What kind of things your friends post there, how often you go check what's up with them, with type of discussions you have there etc'.
  - Quequau 8y ago
    I don't use any other social media. So I post everything that pops into my mind, news that I read elsewhere, things that go in my life, and often stuff that's much more personal than I would have ever posted anywhere else. The discussion is much the same as what I suppose people have on Facebook, Instagram or whatever... though it's orders of magnitude more civil and reasonable. Roughly half the group has also abandoned all other social media, while the other half occasionally act as a Facebook diode by posting worthy or important things they might come across. As the group now lives in several different countries on different continents, having a mechanism that helps us work around time zone constraints which isn't an unmanageable tangle of email chains is hugely beneficial. It's remarkable how making things easier to keep track of wound up facilitating a lot more discussion. Also as it's just us we have no constraints concerning thread life cycles. So when something occurs that relates to our discussion in some ancient thread it's not a problem to revive it. So we've got threads that run over the course of five years.
    - jtrtoo 8y ago
      How much do the connections between the people in your friend group overlap? How do you deal with people you're connected with but not necessarily others in the group? Just thinking out loud. Thanks for sharing!
      - Quequau 8y ago
        Everyone in the group has known each other since the late seventies, we just don't live in the same places anymore. It's just us and, except for a couple of deaths, the group hasn't changed size in a couple of decades. We haven't and wouldn't invite anyone else.