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Comment by underdeserver | Hacker News Reader

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)

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Everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. What I'm saying is that's a boring reason not to do something you believe in.

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.

Okay.

Many of us are insane in this way. Deride us as blind and foolish.

> 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?

Good question, let's try to answer it. Suppose OP believes they have a serviceable replacement in place. What arguments could they use to convince their communities to switch to it? Here's some ideas:

- No ads.

- Free, even for business-use.

- No algorithm interfering with visibility.

- It's usable by community members who do not have a Facebook account, for whatever reason.

- Allows for more free-form content.

- More choices for content delivery format & notifications (say, email, text message, newsletter links).

Maybe you can come up with some. What would you find to be a convincing argument to switch to a community-owned organization platform instead of Facebook?

Who pays for it?

I'd suspect the 'free' and 'no ads' would be somewhat mutually exclusive. Perhaps a particular group organizer pays a modest amount - $19/year(?) - to manage/moderate groups up to X000 members.

Which means it isn't free, it's a charity project paid for by the group organizer(s). That's probably fine in the short term, maybe even longer, but eventually the organizer(s) will move out of the area, or get tired of managing the group, or die, or whatever, and someone will need to manage it.

Honestly if it really would just need to cover the price of the cheapest hosting you can find and the domain registration a single small-to-medium Adsense ad in the sidebar might generate enough to cover it. I don't know how many impressions/pageviews it takes to generate $20 but it can't be that many.

I didn't say it would have to be free.

I run some meetup groups, and still pay for it for now, but the price hikes and other charges they're adding are onerous. I know many groups who have shutdown, and I know of some other players wanting to get in to this space to take over from meetup.com. $10/month to run a smallish group is affordable for a lot of folks. $50/month is not. $300/year is just not worth it to many folks, but... $99/year would be. Meetup seems to be moving in to some weird 'hyper optimize for short term revenue' move, which makes me think they'll be gone or acquired/dismantled in the next 5 years.

Hello, it appears you've never even ran the most basic internet platform before in your life.

Simply put you have to ask the most important questions first, then build an app backwards from that

1) How will it be paid for

2) How will it be moderated.

So, you've already failed number one. You have no means to pay for it.

Then you failed number two. If it gains even a modicum of popularity it will be completely and totally over ran with spam.

I agree it's unlikely to succeed, but I find thinking about our problems and trying to fix them much more admirable & interesting than just rolling over and accepting things as they are. You can't improve things if you never even try.

These aphorisms also don't improve things. There are actual barriers to trying something; if your suggestion doesn't clear them then yes, it's no point trying that suggestion.

You can't improve things if you never even try.

There are things you should not try as you can easily deduce that they are not rooted in any reality, e.g. "free" and "no-ads"

Signal not existing at all proves your point i guess.

The important issue in thinking about problems is understanding all the interconnected problems.

The internet is a horrifically hostile place. If you design a product without that in mind you're creating a danger for yourself and for your users. Slap a community site up without thinking about COPPA or GDPR or whatever Californian law and suddenly you'll have problems. Slap a site up without heavy moderation and it will be filled with the most awful porn you can imagine.

It's not about just accepting the way things the way the are, it's avoiding becoming a casualty of the way things are.

> most people don't care about having this battle

That is also true of every advance society makes: Most people are happy the way they are. It's an obstacle every innovator and leader faces. Yet somehow, we make changes and advances.

Most people don't care about the platform that's used if there's enough buy-in.

I was part of something similar a few years ago at a local makerspace. We were using Meetup.com for a while then someone relatively new suggested we try using Discord instead. There wasn't much of a convincing reason besides "let's try it", so a bit over half of the active people gave it a shot, and everyone else followed since that's where the activity was.

While a few people were initially grumbly over making a new account, there aren't many complaints now that we have bots to help with calendars and a bot to help us monitor equipment.

It’s a Quixotic quest. Moving an online community off Facebook isn’t changing the world for the better or worse. It’s inconsequential unless you build an objectively better community. Just switching from Coke to Pepsi isn’t a wasted effort. Focus on zero to one, not zero to another version of zero.

It increases privacy (depending on the new platform), and reduces exposure to whatever toxic stuff is on FB.

Doing something personally is fine. But trying to convince an entire community to ditch something that works and is likely incredibly valuable to them to stick it to some billionaire you don't like is just wrong.

We all helped our families and loved ones to ditch MSN for Google Talk for Skype for WhatsApp for Discord etc.

It might happen again. :)

You're being sarcastic when you're implying that any of those switches were worth it, right?

its not wrong - we should all ditch facebook

it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned

It doesn’t matter what the poster believes. He is doing something for the benefit of a community that doesn’t care about whatever ideological battle he is trying to fight and inconveniencing them in the process

Fine, let’s nobody do anything and convince nobody of nothing. Sit on couch, watch telly, mind own business. Great life!

If this is how you feel, you must feel inconvenienced that HN isn't a Facebook Group.

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