EDIT: 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.
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/
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.
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.
So: my advice is to not think of it as all-or-nothing. You will not be able to move 300k people off of Facebook overnight. This is somewhat akin to every IT migration project ever: it always takes longer than you think, and is not always a linear process from "fewer people migrated" to "more people migrated".
It's also akin to community organizing: there is no substitute for actually talking to people about it, especially in the initial phases. Or: high-touch sales, where you may initially need to spend a lot of energy and time per person successfully moved over. The other common thing here is that you will hear "no" a lot, which is a valuable experience anyways (but will be frustrating).
Also: unfortunately, no one will care if it's self-hosted or federated, outside of niche tech circles. They will care about whether they can reach the people they want to reach, and whether the user experience is good or not. This is reality: talking about these points will not help you.
Some things you'll probably need to do:
- Identify a single credible alternative platform. - Identify specific groups of people who are willing to be early "de-adopters". For instance: a local youth group, a sports club, whatever. Ideally you are a part of this group already; you then have a much better chance. Businesses will likely say no, so you want community groups. - Within those groups, identify champions: people who care about the same thing you care about, and are willing to commit time and effort to help. - Together with your champions, build a toolkit that allows you to scale up your efforts. This may be guides on how to talk to people about the change - what works, what doesn't. This might be instructions for setting up a specific platform. It might be communications channels, leaflets / flyers for putting up in public places, whatever.
Whether they'd be receptive to share their secret sauce and let a thousand Front Porches bloom is another question though, guess you could ask them! :)
Pay for it with ads from local businesses, and give it away for free at all those stores. Get your regional Chamber of Commerce to help set you up with connections and sales channels.
This is a hard problem because people expect real-time chat, videoconferencing, livestreaming, privacy controls, proper notifications, profiles, photo uploads and much more.
I have spent over a decade building essentially an open-source Facebook that can federate in more interesting ways than Mastodon, and can support Matrix protocol and much more etc. It has all those features I mentioned out of the box, and is completely open-source.
Short answer, watch this:
Or just look at these PDFs:
https://qbix.com/community.pdf
Longer answer, read this: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
We use it to serve our own local communities:
Here is the code: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Or if you want, contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com and I can help set it up for you.
Never had the opportunity to test it, but it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft as an alternative to facebook for community/event organization. Might fit the bill for you.
I've never used Facebook for anything, but the above four tools work very well for us.
Decidim is a political social network that allows communities to have a free technology, with democratic guarantees and designed for the common good. While this technology can be installed with knowledge of Ruby on Rails and some knowledge of servers, so perfectly self-hosted, there are also organisations that offer it in SaaS format at a very competitive price. Also, you can federated differents Decidims:)
* Look into hosting a forum (e.g. phpBB). Forums are excellent because they don't lose old information like facebook does. When someone says "Hey what's the policy on dogs?" three years later I can search "dogs" and find the answer. Downside: They're not pretty, not full of pictures and no infinite scrollingz. sadge alfababies. Kidding aside, if you do try a forum, be sure to not offer a bunch of niche subtopics. The more subtopics the more stale the forum feels overall. Just stick to one main topic until someone asks for a second.
* IRC chat. I hosted an IRC group for several years at work and it worked great. We only killed it when we decided to move to an enterprise communication app.
Loomio - this is usually for coops, especially decision making, but last I checked works well as a forum.
Lemmy - federated reddit alternative.
Discourse - the forum we know and love.
Flarum - decent alternative to discourse.
The challenge with all these is moderation: Lemmy solves it best by having subreddit style division of labour, with moderation per "board". Discourse supports trusted users if memory serves, and I'm not sure about the others.
I'm pretty sure discourse and Lemmy also support eg, log in with google/facebook/etc which eases onboarding a lot.
Personally, I'd go with Lemmy. It is less mature than discourse but probably more suited to your purposes.
What does that mean? I think we need a lot more context on what you want to do. Are you the IT administrator for the county and want to find alternative ways of disseminating announcements? Or are you just a citizen that wants people to chat somewhere else?
-most of what you need is basically something similar to Facebook Groups (nowadays, I bookmark Facebook Groups for the 3 groups I follow, and skip the main feed, which is basically all ads and random memes these days)
-you need a platform with mass adoption - FB got it w/ free accounts back in the day, connecting old classmates or whatnot. So a new platform would need to be free for average users
-simple signup - single "Server" - i.e. can't have the weaknesses of individual forum server software or even mastodon/federated solutions (not enough users, hard to setup)
-some way to monetize - i.e. the sins of Facebook can be traced (in part) to reliance on ads to monetize. so maybe charge for admins who want to set up their own group? It would be be an order of magnitude less income than Facebook but maybe sustainable if you keep the scope of such a site/service small.
The younger gen these days use a lot of discord, older gen uses slack, but the way they are set up with individual "servers" seems clunky to me, and no web interface but it's relatively close.
You may be able to get away with the free tier of Slack.
The success of newer social platforms like Discord is mostly people creating new groups there, rather than wholesale migrations. Facebook itself followed that pattern in earlier days.
If you just want a discussion board, Discourse is self-hostable and people might be familiar with it from other companies. I’d argue it’s not a very normie-friendly platform however and out of the box, I find the notification defaults quite annoying. Maybe admins can change that, but most of the communities that I’m a part of do not.
This person made the mistake they did because of their social isolation and the probation officer is entirely supportive of his developing more face-to-face connection, but he finds it frustrating to find a poster for something like a board game club which has nothing but a QR code that points to a Facebook page.
v4 now fully federates, has always been self-hostable, and is a great piece of software for migrating from Facebook.
Consider the "feed" plugin for a less jarring experience. Push notifications via the "web-push" plugin.
You can check it out at https://dateit.com/ I’d be happy to offer you and maybe some others here free access to our premium features so you can experience everything the app has to offer. Just create an account and email me at rob@dateit.com and mention this post.
Anyone have bright new ideas on this angle?
Facebook is used for a lot of notification/scheduling at my local game store though. I refuse to use Facebook, but don't want to be a burden on everyone else. I found some people I like and gave them my phone number and told them I'm down for a game whenever they are. Although rare, I have gotten a text before and gone and had fun.
Communities are made of people, do you think they'd be willing to move?
I think you'd have to go through and make sure you know exactly what to tell them to install/configure for each of the following scenarios:
* Willing to install an iOS app.
* Willing to install an Android app.
* Willing to create an account in a Web site, and want to get email when someone in the group says something (with a hashtag or whatever).
Also see whether they're willing to talk on Fediverse, or they want something less public.
It's built around managing a community, from the perspective of the community manager or head of community. It harnesses the power of hosts, the people who actually make the events happen and captures the free energy in the system of human to human community.
I actually think for your use case it would be perfect. In each town you can crowd source (or directly invite the facebook group admins as hosts) hosts to create events and then run them. The platform started from creating and scaling the All-In Podcast community and now have worked with Tim Ferris, Blueprint/Don't Die, and next week all the events for Utah Tech Week https://app.getriver.io/utahtechweek
There's a content creator I follow that proudly moved from Youtube to their own Peertube instance. Even though I like their content, I never run into it anymore. Every couple months I think "oh yeah, I should check on them" and manually navigate to their Peertube instance and watch half a video.
Make sure you aren't dooming the community.
This divisiveness hurts across the world, but is painful when it goes local. These are people you see at the grocery store or teachers who can retaliate against your kids.
We just launched a hateless social media platform. People can speak freely on any topic, including politics. But a clever combination of aliases, real names, and respect functionality kills off the nastiness.
If any of this rings true to you, I'd love to help.
Mike Schoeffler https://hiweave.com/
Succesful local communities always utilize more platforms - meaning they are cross posting on something like Facebook, Instagram, their own website, and sometimes other sites. Can also help to have a WhatsApp group chat
Other local communities specific apps I have seen successfully used:
Meetup.com (been around for awhile and seems lesser used) Heylo Circle (not the crypto)
I've never used this before but you can try:
2i2wbyza4 at mozmail dot com
Or suggest a contact method.
In Vermont, there are mailing lists for every town that are widely used, https://vitalcommunities.org/community-discussion-lists/ and also Front Porch Forum https://frontporchforum.com/. I guess the latter is pretty much what you are talking about, a community social network that is not Facebook or Nextdoor and not trying to become a megacorp.
There is still a lot of facebook groups for many small towns, but its easy enough to totally ignore and just use noticeboards, ask/talk to real people, etc if you want.
One alternative is an old-school email list. We have one run by a single older woman, who refuses any form of updates or help. If she’s sick, emails don’t go out. If you want to sign up, you need to ask her. Still, it’s easy for people to use on a variety of platforms, uses minimal data, doesn’t have any tracking, and doesn’t have ads. The longer-form, slower nature of email makes it less likely to devolve into drama like the local Facebook groups do.
Even if you do self-host something decentralized, you need it to be reliable without you. If you succeed and your community relies on it, you’re doing them a disservice by not making it a reliable even if your circumstances change.
It federates with Mastodon and co.
Some statistics: https://fedidb.org/software/friendica
When I do, I would start with a website/blog, probably using Ghost. Good community starts with good communication. Comments are just fine for initial community building. Once you have some traction, consider a forum.
Also, look into Front Porch Forum, they've been doing it their own way for years, it can work.
For your bonus criteria email can be self hosted but that's a more complicated topic as it pertains to mailing lists. At least a couple people in your community should be at list technical enough to follow internet examples. Mailing lists are federated per the spirit of the definition as they can each use their own existing email provider.
Google+ "failed" (for various definitions thereof) and while it had numerous failures of its own I wonder how much critical mass it failed to achieve because Facebook was hijacking the sharing of it
Like they hijacked email addresses, to make it hard to move them to another social network https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Community building would probably be way more efficient if done in person. That would make getting to know each other way easier. It would allow 'water fountain' type of interactions; which you usually don't have online.
So, my 2 cents would be to find a park, or something else public (weather permitting) and gather there. It could also bring passerbys to get curious and gather more people.
Not everything has to have a technological solution. In-person interactions should be more important for community building.
If you're serious about this, then you need to ask yourself (as dispassionately as possible) why you think this should happen. What benefits are you trying to provide, what shortcomings are trying to bridge. Then validate with your community that these are actually problems they even want addressed, and if so how badly do they want it. Then search for alternatives that explicitly accomplish that.
Maybe that is something that works for you as well if everybody is already connected. It is completely login-less but does only provide event planning features, maybe you need more…(?)
Disclaimer: my site
https://framalibre.org/ (it's french only, sorry)
Good luck!
You pay once, self-host, and get unlimited users.
You would have the hosting expenses, but that's nowhere near what a SaaS product would require you to spend.
It's early alpha - here's the story behind it:
Let me know if this is what you're after and you want some help setting up an instance.
Still, I would like to find something that does text, email, and basic group features like calendar and photos
Network effect is always the party pooper. If everyone's using Facebook it's unlikely they'll want to switch to anything else.
I applaud and encourage your chutzpah, but I’m not too optimistic about your prospects. Do you want to move your community out of Facebook, or does the community want to do it? Do they even agree with your reasons for wanting to move, or is it possible they actually agree with Zuckerberg and voted for Trump?
Remember you only have one shot. With that large of a group, you’ll find people with all levels of skill, patience, and ideology. If your solution isn’t immediately better (not equal; better) than Facebook, you already lost. It doesn’t need to be better at everything, but it does need to be better at the most important and most used features. And make sure you believe in the cause enough to be the goto person for every question.
Make a list of what the platform needs to support and do and come back with that. Then test, test, test. You won’t succeed if you rush, people move slowly.
Best of luck to you.
What sort of features are you looking for in a community platform?
Im in the same situation, in my rural area everything happens through local facebook groups. If you are not there, you will not get party invitations , voice calls etc
Set it up.
Send the URL to your neighbors.
See who joins. Might take off, might (probably) not. But seems to me that's basically it.
Example: mightynetworks.com
Good luck, because most people use there cell phones now days and a lot of sw like those listed are just not meant for that format.
Forums:
phpBB - phpbb.com SMF - simplemachines.org MyBB - mybb.com bbPress - bbpress.org XMB - xmbforum2.com Flarum - flarum.org ElkArte - elkarte.net FUDforum - fudforum.org miniBB - minibb.com TidyBB - tidybb.co.uk Flatboard - flatboard.org
Social Networking:
pH7Builder - ph7builder.com Jcow - jcow.net Open Source Social Network - opensource-socialnetwork.org HumHub - humhub.org Family Connections - familycms.com Elgg 6 - elgg.org
