Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?
20 points - yesterday at 8:57 AM
Facebook's feed is nonfunctional. Only some people get notification, even though they have notification for all messages turned on. Only some get the newest posts in their main feed. Sometimes I do get notifications, but only long after an urgent message was posted.
Has anybody successfully moved their local community off of Facebook groups?
I'm thinking about neighbor conversations/events, daycare, kindergarten, kids' classmates, sporting communities, etc.
If so, where did you go? Did you build something yourself or do you self-host some open source project? Did you find a good paid alternative?
Several of my once-Facebook groups have moved to Discord. The Discord business model seems relatively aligned to user-friendly in a free-to-start way that mostly scales with community interest (individuals self-selecting to Nitro; Nitro boots into a community), for the most part, today.
(There are doubts the current model survives the next step in investment rounds, an IPO, but we'll see.)
muzaniyesterday at 1:32 PM
At this point, I'm so tempted to just write some mobile-first forum software or make an alt-reddit. Communities have so much value, but they barely exist anymore.
gus_massayesterday at 5:39 PM
Most groups here in Argentina run on WhatsApp. You get like a hundred messages per day. Luckily someone pins the important messages, she deserves a medal.
There's no known truly superior alternative to Facebook Groups (and the original article is, obviously, not what it once was, anymore, either).
A lot of possible alternatives appear to come close, but none really satisfies it.
The area is very ripe for disruption.
rurbanyesterday at 6:08 PM
Everyone older moved from Facebook to WhatsApp years ago. The youngsters went to Insta instead.
al_borlandyesterday at 2:46 PM
I have a NextDoor account, which is made for the neighbor stuff. That said, I don’t manage a community on it and haven’t actually logged into it in over a year, so I can’t really speak to its quality. I did have to spend a lot of time turning off notifications, it is very noisy by default.
mooredsyesterday at 5:26 PM
We actually have an old fashioned email list. It's a Google Group, because Yahoo Groups shut down.
tracker1yesterday at 4:34 PM
There's lots of web-forum software out there... I like the FB group UX, but it's definitely gotten worse over time. I think the problem is network affect and notifications in general.
I've gotten to where I disable notifications on almost everything to the point I usually don't even see a lot of messages until I check myself.
I'm more inclined to write my own, but that feels like such a hit or miss proposal at this point.
bjournetoday at 1:18 AM
In the group I administer posts of many members always get stuck in the spam filter queue so I have to check it manually every day to let their posts through. It's painful. But it is the only thing that works for non-techie people. People 70+ just won't get used to slack or any other less dumb alternative.