10 ms·

> 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 l

> 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.

sebstefan 2y ago
Most people in the US have already quit that app, the battle's not that uphill. You're starting half up
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > Most people in the US have already quit that app Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?
  - TuringNYC 2y ago
    >> 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.
- tartuffe78 2y ago
  This is not my experience living in a small (~5,000) city , Facebook is where everything, farmer's markets, fairs and festivals, and other community events are announced and organized.
- arbor_day 2y ago
  That seems wrong. More than half the US population uses Facebook. https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...
  - mplewis 2y ago
    There is absolutely no way that 80% of the US actively uses Facebook.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  yup, quitting in droves ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarterly-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarter...
  - rgbrgb 2y ago
    That shows quarterly revenue not user activity in the US? In my orbit there is nearly 0 Facebook usage outside of a few boomers but instagram seems very popular.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      So you’re going to ignore publicly available information based on your anecdote?
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      "In my orbit" there 100% of the people play racquetball which means there are roughly 350 million players in the USA - hence it is the most popular sport on the planet and owner of my local team is richer than all NFL owners combined /s :) Also see https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... just for kicks :)
      - rgbrgb 2y ago
        ok well at least that's the number that was being discussed. 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.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  This doesn’t jibe with publicly available statistics..
- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  Most people you know may have. But most people have not quit Facebook.
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> 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.
- nxm 2y ago
  [flagged]
- karaterobot 2y ago
  The point is that the people he's trying to communicate with don't care about that. You don't need to argue about that here, it's not relevant.
- sirsinsalot 2y ago
  Dying? It isn't free speech if you can say what you like, but can only do it in a sound proofed room, alone.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    He’s talking about private groups. 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.
    - graemep 2y ago
      > Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. 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.
      - 2y ago
coldpie 2y ago
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.
- jf22 2y ago
  If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Maybe that's why OP is looking for an alternative to use for communication and organization?
  - latexr 2y ago
    Tell that to Jadav Payeng, who planted a forest by himself. He accomplished, on his own, more for the good of the world than most communities on Facebook ever will. https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-man-who-planted-an-entire-forest-by-himself https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      Rural Facebook communities aren't trying to change the world. They're there for light conversation, gossip and organizing get-togethers. 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.
      - latexr 2y ago
        > 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.
bottled_poe 2y ago
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.
JohnMakin 2y ago
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.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  No it isn't. Moving yourself off of a platform is one thing. Moving 200k random users off (for reasons?) is impossible.
- tredre3 2y ago
  > This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services 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".
mplewis 2y ago
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.
lsllc 2y ago
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.
- seb1204 2y ago
  I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Yeah, my gut is that of those 30K people on Facebook you might get a few hundred to join a new platform. But maybe not. It probably won't be very useful without the other 29K people plus (even if a lot of those are probably not very active). 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).
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  You won't get folks to move, because people tend to "stay stuck." 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.
hallman76 2y ago
> 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.
kcplate 2y ago
> 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.
chickenfeed 2y ago
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.
honestSysAdmin 2y ago
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.
gadders 2y ago
"Hi everyone. I want to inconvenience hundreds of people because of my minority political beliefs."
20after4 2y ago
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 2y ago

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

pavel_lishin 2y ago
> Most people in the US have already quit that app Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?
- TuringNYC 2y ago
  >> 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.
tartuffe78 2y ago
This is not my experience living in a small (~5,000) city , Facebook is where everything, farmer's markets, fairs and festivals, and other community events are announced and organized.
arbor_day 2y ago
That seems wrong. More than half the US population uses Facebook. https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...
- mplewis 2y ago
  There is absolutely no way that 80% of the US actively uses Facebook.
bdangubic 2y ago
yup, quitting in droves ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarterly-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/223289/facebooks-quarter...
- rgbrgb 2y ago
  That shows quarterly revenue not user activity in the US? In my orbit there is nearly 0 Facebook usage outside of a few boomers but instagram seems very popular.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    So you’re going to ignore publicly available information based on your anecdote?
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    "In my orbit" there 100% of the people play racquetball which means there are roughly 350 million players in the USA - hence it is the most popular sport on the planet and owner of my local team is richer than all NFL owners combined /s :) Also see https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... just for kicks :)
    - rgbrgb 2y ago
      ok well at least that's the number that was being discussed. 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.
scarface_74 2y ago
This doesn’t jibe with publicly available statistics..
that_guy_iain 2y ago
Most people you know may have. But most people have not quit Facebook.

ADeerAppeared 2y ago

> 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.

nxm 2y ago
[flagged]
karaterobot 2y ago
The point is that the people he's trying to communicate with don't care about that. You don't need to argue about that here, it's not relevant.
sirsinsalot 2y ago
Dying? It isn't free speech if you can say what you like, but can only do it in a sound proofed room, alone.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  He’s talking about private groups. 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.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. 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.
    - 2y ago

coldpie 2y ago

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.

jf22 2y ago
If you can't communicate with anyone you can't make the world a better place.
- diggan 2y ago
  Maybe that's why OP is looking for an alternative to use for communication and organization?
- latexr 2y ago
  Tell that to Jadav Payeng, who planted a forest by himself. He accomplished, on his own, more for the good of the world than most communities on Facebook ever will. https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-man-who-planted-an-entire-forest-by-himself https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Rural Facebook communities aren't trying to change the world. They're there for light conversation, gossip and organizing get-togethers. 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.
    - latexr 2y ago
      > 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.

bottled_poe 2y ago

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.

JohnMakin 2y ago

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.

bongodongobob 2y ago
No it isn't. Moving yourself off of a platform is one thing. Moving 200k random users off (for reasons?) is impossible.
tredre3 2y ago
> This is a bizarre response on a platform that frequently discusses moving things off of centralized applications and services 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".

mplewis 2y ago

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.

lsllc 2y ago

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.

seb1204 2y ago
I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.
ghaff 2y ago
Yeah, my gut is that of those 30K people on Facebook you might get a few hundred to join a new platform. But maybe not. It probably won't be very useful without the other 29K people plus (even if a lot of those are probably not very active). 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).
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
You won't get folks to move, because people tend to "stay stuck." 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.

hallman76 2y ago

> 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.

kcplate 2y ago

> 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.

chickenfeed 2y ago

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.

honestSysAdmin 2y ago

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.

gadders 2y ago

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

20after4 2y ago

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.