6 ms·

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,

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.
  - jf22 2y ago
    Eh, that's improvement, but the world didn't change because of a small forest.
    - latexr 2y ago
      You (and your parent comment) said “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Very few things change the world meaningfully. And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.
      - jf22 2y ago
        Splitting hairs. 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.
        latexr 2y ago
        The point is precisely that you don’t need a social networking platform to do something meaningful.
        jf22 2y ago
        I don't think the author was talking about isolated change like planting some seeds. Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.
        latexr 2y ago
        > isolated 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 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.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  We could communicate more effectively 20 or so years ago. Communication technology had already matured, but we didn’t have these engagement-driven social media platforms. The goal of these platforms isn’t to communicate, it is to sell ads and pick engaging posts to re-broadcast. 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.
  - jf22 2y ago
    Sure, but if nobody is on the platform or other end of the line, who cares?
  - briandear 2y ago
    Communication was more effective 20 years ago? I remember using a Skypager when I was a Reuters journalist. I also remember processing film in bathrooms at news events then having to scan negatives using a suitcase-sized scanner and computer and it being 30-60 minutes to get photos onto the wire. Now it’s instant. Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      >Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago 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.
  - bko 2y ago
    I think you're mixing a few things here. There's social media (TikTok, Instagram, X, viral crap) and then there's social media (organize parties, facebook marketplace, Whatsapp, etc). 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.
ecshafer 2y ago
Do you think its a better place, or do the users think its a better place? Take political partisanship out of it. So its about a 30/30/40 breakdown between Trump/Harris/None. So 70% of people either Support or Don't care that much about Trump, and that's assuming that every single democratic voter is angry enough to quit Facebook over this, this is probably not true. You are looking at probably >85% of people that don't think that getting rid of Facebook would make things better. A better world is subjective.
- coldpie 2y ago
  > 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.
- vladms 2y ago
  Is Facebook though the perfect community tool? Using centralized systems has advantages (simple/easy/available/cheap) but also disadvantages (less customization/less control/more expensive). When Facebook appeared maybe the alternatives were not there due to technical complexity is this still the case nowadays?...
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    There were alternatives, but the network effect is real. Facebook wants people to stay on their platform, sure, but people also like staying in one app if they can. They know how to use it, and it's not yet another app.
underdeserver 2y ago
Facebook is where his community is, and it's good enough for them. Why would anyone move? What possible hope does he have of overcoming the network effect and convincing people to move to something they don't know? (And is most likely - for their use case - a worse experience)
- coldpie 2y ago
  Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    There are a lot of justified, boring reasons to not do something. I despise Facebook, but I'm also not going to waste my time trying to convince my cohorts to use a self-hosted federated alternative. You have to be blindly foolish to even hold out the slightest hope that these people will use an alternative, and I say that as a Mastodon user/apologist.
    - coldpie 2y ago
      Okay.
    - horacemorace 2y ago
      Many of us are insane in this way. Deride us as blind and foolish.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle 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?
    - coldpie 2y ago
jklinger410 2y ago
> If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. 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.
- cyanydeez 2y ago
  you're arguing local, short term benefits with global long term damage. 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.
  - bko 2y ago
    > techno fascism 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.
    - jfactorial 2y ago
      I think "techno fascism" is a term people are using to describe tech company CEOs operating as unelected oligarchs embedded within the new US government. 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.
pimlottc 2y ago
I wish them luck too! But you have to be realistic and understand your users. Their value are not necessarily your values. A new services must be clearly better for them to switch; just being "not Facebook" is not that compelling to the average person.
tobyjsullivan 2y ago
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
- randcraw 2y ago
  More precisely, that unreasonable man must add sufficient extraordinary value to his product to convert complacent users into willing defectors. 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?
pc86 2y ago
Nobody is talking about "making the world a better place," we're talking about a few Facebook groups using a different app instead (and approximately 100% of those people will still be on Facebook doing other things).
- danparsonson 2y ago
  Incremental change is also a thing

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.
- jf22 2y ago
  Eh, that's improvement, but the world didn't change because of a small forest.
  - latexr 2y ago
    You (and your parent comment) said “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Very few things change the world meaningfully. And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.
    - jf22 2y ago
      Splitting hairs. 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.
      - latexr 2y ago
        The point is precisely that you don’t need a social networking platform to do something meaningful.
        jf22 2y ago
        I don't think the author was talking about isolated change like planting some seeds. Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.
        latexr 2y ago
        > isolated 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 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.
bee_rider 2y ago
We could communicate more effectively 20 or so years ago. Communication technology had already matured, but we didn’t have these engagement-driven social media platforms. The goal of these platforms isn’t to communicate, it is to sell ads and pick engaging posts to re-broadcast. 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.
- jf22 2y ago
  Sure, but if nobody is on the platform or other end of the line, who cares?
- briandear 2y ago
  Communication was more effective 20 years ago? I remember using a Skypager when I was a Reuters journalist. I also remember processing film in bathrooms at news events then having to scan negatives using a suitcase-sized scanner and computer and it being 30-60 minutes to get photos onto the wire. Now it’s instant. Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    >Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago 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.
- bko 2y ago
  I think you're mixing a few things here. There's social media (TikTok, Instagram, X, viral crap) and then there's social media (organize parties, facebook marketplace, Whatsapp, etc). 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.

ecshafer 2y ago

Do you think its a better place, or do the users think its a better place? Take political partisanship out of it. So its about a 30/30/40 breakdown between Trump/Harris/None. So 70% of people either Support or Don't care that much about Trump, and that's assuming that every single democratic voter is angry enough to quit Facebook over this, this is probably not true. You are looking at probably >85% of people that don't think that getting rid of Facebook would make things better. A better world is subjective.

coldpie 2y ago
> 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.
vladms 2y ago
Is Facebook though the perfect community tool? Using centralized systems has advantages (simple/easy/available/cheap) but also disadvantages (less customization/less control/more expensive). When Facebook appeared maybe the alternatives were not there due to technical complexity is this still the case nowadays?...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  There were alternatives, but the network effect is real. Facebook wants people to stay on their platform, sure, but people also like staying in one app if they can. They know how to use it, and it's not yet another app.

underdeserver 2y ago

Facebook is where his community is, and it's good enough for them. Why would anyone move? What possible hope does he have of overcoming the network effect and convincing people to move to something they don't know? (And is most likely - for their use case - a worse experience)

coldpie 2y ago
Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.
- talldayo 2y ago
  There are a lot of justified, boring reasons to not do something. I despise Facebook, but I'm also not going to waste my time trying to convince my cohorts to use a self-hosted federated alternative. You have to be blindly foolish to even hold out the slightest hope that these people will use an alternative, and I say that as a Mastodon user/apologist.
  - coldpie 2y ago
    Okay.
  - horacemorace 2y ago
    Many of us are insane in this way. Deride us as blind and foolish.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle 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?
  - coldpie 2y ago

jklinger410 2y ago

> If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. 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.

cyanydeez 2y ago
you're arguing local, short term benefits with global long term damage. 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.
- bko 2y ago
  > techno fascism 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.
  - jfactorial 2y ago
    I think "techno fascism" is a term people are using to describe tech company CEOs operating as unelected oligarchs embedded within the new US government. 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.

pimlottc 2y ago

I wish them luck too! But you have to be realistic and understand your users. Their value are not necessarily your values. A new services must be clearly better for them to switch; just being "not Facebook" is not that compelling to the average person.

tobyjsullivan 2y ago

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

randcraw 2y ago
More precisely, that unreasonable man must add sufficient extraordinary value to his product to convert complacent users into willing defectors. 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?

pc86 2y ago

Nobody is talking about "making the world a better place," we're talking about a few Facebook groups using a different app instead (and approximately 100% of those people will still be on Facebook doing other things).

danparsonson 2y ago
Incremental change is also a thing