HACKER Q&A
📣 madsohm

Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?


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?

  👤 muzani Accepted Answer ✓
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.
👤 al_borland
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.
👤 tracker1
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.

👤 gus_massa
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.

Racket is using https://www.discourse.org/contact , but I'm not sure how civilian friendly it is.

👤 mooreds
We actually have an old fashioned email list. It's a Google Group, because Yahoo Groups shut down.
👤 WorldMaker
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.)

👤 rurban
Everyone older moved from Facebook to WhatsApp years ago. The youngsters went to Insta instead.