I belong to a Facebook group that is also an actual mostly-local group of people who meet. It’s a private group connected to a hobby, and one of the two admins has to let you in. The number of FB members is quite large compared to the number that regularly come to meetings (but lots of them come once in a while), and includes people that used to live in the area but have moved away. The FB group is used to announce meeting times and places, to make other kinds of announcements, to share information and new stuff, to ask questions or to ask for help connected to the hobby.
Many of the members are pretty fed up with FB, but what they are proposing to take its place (so far, Blue Sky and Discord) seem to be Twitter-analogs. So I’m wondering if there is anything out there that is a better fit for this kind of actual physical group-related FB Group function?
The benefit of the FB group is that it’s a login that people already have, and they can easily reply to posts, direct message people, see events, etc. without having another login.
If you were to create another service, everyone would have to sign up there again, and you’ll probably lose members in the process.
Probably the only other major services that people might already have accounts for are things like Google Groups (free, and they can use their current Gmail accounts) and maybe Meetup (better UX than Google Groups typically, but the organizer has to pay a monthly fee). You can also set up a Discourse forum (which is what the SDMB uses) but allow Facebook, Google, and Apple logins (to make it easier for them).
But it’s still a separate website that they have to go to (or check their email for), vs having everything integrated in their Facebook timeline.
Google Groups + a free Google Site (for more permanent “about us” type of information) is the janky, free way to do that. It works, it just won’t be pretty or especially nice, and I think they generally get a lot less engagement than a Facebook group would (because, again, it’s just another service that people have to separately check… so they usually don’t bother). Nothing beats the simple ability to like and comment on FB group posts… it’s the lowest-friction way to keep a community like that active.
(And I say that as someone who no longer has a Facebook account. I miss out on a tremendous amount of events because of it.)
Blue sky isn’t at all perfect for what I want. I’ve experimented by posting the same thing on Blue sky and on Facebook, and I’ll get zero responses on the former and 60 or 70 reactions and a dozen comments on the latter. I think it’s a function of having a 15-year-long community on Facebook, but also Facebook is a little easier (for me, anyway) to follow conversations; BlueSky seems designed more for monologues.
So on the one hand I’d love something closer to FB to replace FB. On the other hand, there’s an XKCD for that:
Years ago, a small group of us used a free user-created message board at
I was the one who set up our board, and it was a snap. Just like the SDMB but smaller. I set up different forums (but you wouldn’t have to). People establish a login, start conversation threads, etc., the whole shebang. It ran flawlessly for several years until we (who were already geographically apart) drifted apart as a group. (Long, boring story.) Don’t know if the boards still work, but worth investigating.
groups.io? I belong to about a dozen of their subgroups. Clean, spam free interface without any annoying tracking AFAIK. I loathe f’book. I keep rejoining for specific data, then quitting.
Yes, very true. Also difficult to get a lot of people adjusted to a new (to them) product and interface. This is only being driven by the number of people who want to get our group off of FB, but so far this is only a vocal minority. I think what I’m maybe trying to do is to find the best alternative I can, and get that going in advance of actual need.
By the way, I should have mentioned that, because of the hobby aspect. easy to post photos are important.
Yes, someone has already set up a Blue Sky account for themselves, and is suggesting that as the new platform. I don’t think that will work very well. Mastodon also seems to be a Twitter substitute.
Maybe, I just don’t have any idea how Discord works or what it can do. I guess I’ll have to look at it further, and maybe see if there is a “Discord for Dummies” site anywhere, that will start from point 1 and not assume I know anything.
This does look promising as well, and it advertises itself as a replacement for Facebook Groups. @Reply’s sentiment above would still stand, for any of these, as being a separate thing and not integrated into a service that most of these folks will already be using.
A whole message board seems like overkill for what we need. What did you do about moderation?
Well, these are all interesting ideas, and clearly I need to do more research if I’m going to do any leading on this issue. We have some very smart people in this group, and I’m hoping to get them involved so I can back away from doing all the work. Please keep the ideas and responses coming.
It was simple with a small group. About 20 of us. I was the mod. I think eventually a couple of other people took on mod responsibilities. But there was virtually no modding needed. It wasn’t the Wild West like the SDMB. We invited people to join so outsiders didn’t just wander in.
What does the size of the platform matter? That’s like saying you have a notebook with 500 pages but you only need to use the first 10 pages-- so what–? Just use what you need.
By “overkill” I mean that there is a lot less conversation and back-and-forth within our current Facebook group (Facebook doesn’t really support that very well) than I would expect on a message board. It is mostly notifications and photos. That ratio might change on a different sort of platform, I’m not sure how many people would want that, and it’s certainly not for me to say.
Also, there are currently 653 members of the group, although I suspect a lot of them are inactive even as followers, and would not bother to switch over to anything. We don’t currently have problems with inappropriate posting or anything requiring intervention now, so perhaps on a more chatty medium that would still be the case.
Anyway, I do appreciate the suggestion. I didn’t mean to imply that I was in any sense ruling it out.
Ha - if you find one, lemme know. I use Discord, but I’ve never set one up. You might ask @SenorBeef - I think he sets one up for the SDMB fantasy leagues. They’re really flexible - you can set up channels and forums for various topics, there are live chat areas, and even audio channels.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I find Discord pretty confusing, despite working in tech and having grown up with IRC, Slack, and gamers. It’s just full of many weird idiosyncrasies, like:
Each person has both a username and possibly a different server profile name. When they post a public message, you see their server profile name. But when they send you a direct message, you see their username. The two can be entirely different, and you would have no idea who they are, especially if their username is not based on their real name.
Most activity happens on “servers”, and you can sign up for a free private one for your group. Inside the server there are channels. Inside a channel there is just one long chat feed. Inside that chat, there may be one or more threads. It can be very difficult to organize things by topic, or find an old message, or even know where you last left off.
Outside of servers, Discord users can also make their own ad-hoc messaging groups. If some subset of your 600+ members does that by accident, they will be posting messages only to each other and not the bigger group at large.
Discord the app itself has a bunch of annoying monetization upsales (trying to sell you some sort of “boost” membership) that can be confusing and annoying for the members.
Nothing on Discord can be searched on the web; it only exists in the app/website. The can’t see events, etc. without both an account and an invite to your private server, and only while logged in.
If any of your users use Discord for other things (it’s common for gamers), they can’t post a different profile picture on your server unless they have a paid membership. If they don’t, then you get a bunch of weird-looking gamer usernames and gamer profile pictures, instead of real names and real photos like on Facebook.
I’ve been trying to get used to it (because so many younger people prefer it) and I use it every day, but I still find it really confusing and wish it weren’t so popular. YMMV.
Slack, for all its quirks, seems much more user-friendly to me. (But would also be a flawed solution for a situation like this).
Either one is just a chat/IM app, more like IRC or AOL Instant Messenger, than a community space the way Facebook Groups is. I think with 600+ members it’s going to be crazy chaotic. I use Discord with groups of like 8-15 people and even then it’s really really hard to keep up with what’s happening. Good moderation and channel management can help, but even then it’s nowhere as easy as Facebook Groups.