3 ms·

>move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution To get better answers, you need to flesh out all the feat

by jasode 2y ago

>move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution To get better answers, you need to flesh out all the features of Facebook that your communities are using. E.g. Shared event calendars? Groups? Private Messaging? Video hosting for users to upload vids of community events? Live feeds? Etc. Look at the left side of navigation topics to help you enumerate and think about it: https://www.facebook.com/help/130979416980121/ https://www.facebook.com/help/130979416980121/ Do you expect those ~50k to create new logins for the new platform? Or do they sign in with their existing "Facebook ID" to avoid hassle of new account creation? Do they need a phone app? If it's website only from the smartphone web browser, do you need web push for notifications? Facebook interaction with others has convenient lookup from the phones' contact listing. Web-only site doesn't have straightforward access to smartphone's address book (without PhoneGap). Etc. If your communities are using a lot of those social networking features, it means trying to use Mastodon as a substitute for Facebook is going to be a very incomplete solution. Of course, alternative solutions are not going to fully match Facebook but you still need to think of the threshold for a minimum viable feature set so your 50k users won't reject it.

jaymzcampbell 2y ago
This is such a great answer. You've given me flashbacks to many zoom meetings that started with "Can't we just...".
heavyset_go 2y ago
I've seen projects go off the rails trying to replicate Facebook's features for their groups, so make sure that your minimum actually means minimum in your MVP. You can build out a million features for Facebook parity, but it doesn't mean much if you have low traction. There were also cases where a simple Wordpress (or whatever) site would have worked, but the owners went all in on replicating FB features, instead of making sure users actually went to their new property at all.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  More to the point, if, like Robert Putnam, you believe that the nation is on the verge of a civic crisis because of the breakdown of local organizations https://www.joinordiefilm.com/ https://www.joinordiefilm.com/ the goal is to get people to join clubs, so you want some kind of service which has a specific mission and the minimal part is important. You want to put blinders on your users. You don't want them to get served irrelevant ads and notifications. I'd consider this site https://fingerlakesrunners.org/ https://fingerlakesrunners.org/ which is basically a calendar of events that they host; they have forums but people aren't chewing the fat, they're having discussions that are focused around the events that https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/ https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/ You don't have the horrific moderation problems that come out of "is it fake or not?" or "is this socially acceptable or not?" because the real question is "is this relevant to the events we put on?" in which case the problem of "your free speech is (in my view) your obnoxious behavior" which gets worse the more purposeless a site is.
RealityVoid 2y ago
The best feature of FB is reach. You can't replicate that without a global social media platform. So don't. Just build local communities that thrive _despite_ the fact they are started on FB. More in-person social interaction might upend FB and social media, but we currently play this game so these are the rules we must follow.
- miohtama 2y ago
  It's reach and UX. Normies can use it. People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Mailing list, Usenet, IRC, are all now dead because no one could invest to UX in these early open protocols. In theory you can reach all users using a mailing list but oh boy, good luck with that one, unless all of your peers are kernel developers.
  - WhyNotHugo 2y ago
    > People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Most of us miss the simplicity of mailing lists. I lived in a new (at the time) neighbourhood back in 2008, and we had a neighbourhood mailing list which was very convenient. Nobody had issues with using it, because there’s very little to learn if you know how ti read and reply emails. Sure, we had to explain “reply to one” vs “reply to all” to a few people, but that’s entirely it. Mailing lists fell out of fashion because of marketing and trends, not because of any inherent limitations.
    - jaffa2 2y ago
      Are there any Mail list servers i can use to organise a local sports group. Using Google map right now but it’s terrible
    - tmcdos 2y ago
      I miss the oldschool forums.
willywanker 2y ago
Mastodon is a Twitter clone, nowhere comparable to Facebook. An endless microblogging format may not be ideal for a local community, as compared to a regular forum (which is just one of the many features Facebook offers).

by jasode 2y ago

jaymzcampbell 2y ago

This is such a great answer. You've given me flashbacks to many zoom meetings that started with "Can't we just...".

heavyset_go 2y ago

I've seen projects go off the rails trying to replicate Facebook's features for their groups, so make sure that your minimum actually means minimum in your MVP. You can build out a million features for Facebook parity, but it doesn't mean much if you have low traction. There were also cases where a simple Wordpress (or whatever) site would have worked, but the owners went all in on replicating FB features, instead of making sure users actually went to their new property at all.

PaulHoule 2y ago
More to the point, if, like Robert Putnam, you believe that the nation is on the verge of a civic crisis because of the breakdown of local organizations https://www.joinordiefilm.com/ https://www.joinordiefilm.com/ the goal is to get people to join clubs, so you want some kind of service which has a specific mission and the minimal part is important. You want to put blinders on your users. You don't want them to get served irrelevant ads and notifications. I'd consider this site https://fingerlakesrunners.org/ https://fingerlakesrunners.org/ which is basically a calendar of events that they host; they have forums but people aren't chewing the fat, they're having discussions that are focused around the events that https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/ https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/ You don't have the horrific moderation problems that come out of "is it fake or not?" or "is this socially acceptable or not?" because the real question is "is this relevant to the events we put on?" in which case the problem of "your free speech is (in my view) your obnoxious behavior" which gets worse the more purposeless a site is.

RealityVoid 2y ago

The best feature of FB is reach. You can't replicate that without a global social media platform. So don't. Just build local communities that thrive _despite_ the fact they are started on FB. More in-person social interaction might upend FB and social media, but we currently play this game so these are the rules we must follow.

miohtama 2y ago
It's reach and UX. Normies can use it. People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Mailing list, Usenet, IRC, are all now dead because no one could invest to UX in these early open protocols. In theory you can reach all users using a mailing list but oh boy, good luck with that one, unless all of your peers are kernel developers.
- WhyNotHugo 2y ago
  > People who were in early days of Internet remember who bad email mailing lists were for organising anything. Most of us miss the simplicity of mailing lists. I lived in a new (at the time) neighbourhood back in 2008, and we had a neighbourhood mailing list which was very convenient. Nobody had issues with using it, because there’s very little to learn if you know how ti read and reply emails. Sure, we had to explain “reply to one” vs “reply to all” to a few people, but that’s entirely it. Mailing lists fell out of fashion because of marketing and trends, not because of any inherent limitations.
  - jaffa2 2y ago
    Are there any Mail list servers i can use to organise a local sports group. Using Google map right now but it’s terrible
  - tmcdos 2y ago
    I miss the oldschool forums.

willywanker 2y ago

Mastodon is a Twitter clone, nowhere comparable to Facebook. An endless microblogging format may not be ideal for a local community, as compared to a regular forum (which is just one of the many features Facebook offers).