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.
Building it is the easy part, getting people to use it is the hard part. I built a HN clone for a client that was intended for entrepreneurship discussions, it didn't take off.
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.)
IMO the problem with Discord is it encourages forming cliques and community fragmentation. I think anyone who's used Discord for long enough has seen their favorite server inevitably add so many channels that the discussion gets spread out and diluted to the point that the server feels dead, even though it might have hundreds of members. At the same time, your most active users eventually form their own group DMs with other active users that they get along with, while posting less and less in the main server.
Discord actively encourages this by making it so easy to form group DMs and splinter servers (a good thing from a user's perspective, but a community-killer from the server's perspective). And financially, it's probably more profitable for Discord to do it that way too.
Some of that is the nature of community building in general. Facebook communities split all the time, and/or move to DMs (whether FB Messenger or WhatsApp or something else) and back.
In terms of dilution, that's something you can generally fight. There's a lot more tools in today's Discord to mitigate "too many channels". Threads and Forum Channels can help. There are moderation actions that you can take like "we're going to move this channel read-only because it hasn't been active since X, consider new conversations in #more-general-channel or threads of it".
In my experience one of the biggest causes of dilution that's less obvious is your server's notification strategy. If a server @everyone or @here or @channel enough, I have a tendency to mute that server and read it less often, and I'm not alone on that. Good use of easy opt-in/opt-out roles for notifications is key moderation tool. In my opinion, a lot of the best servers entirely disable @everyone/@here/@channel, have dedicated notifications for alerts, and have a dedicated Announcements channel for any "everyone notification" (but without @everyone mentions) that can be followed or muted separately from the rest of @-mentions (more personal replies, for instance).
Anyway, if you seem to be facing too much dilution, the other key is to ask people what they need, if they are happy with the current channel layout, and if they have suggestions on channels to merge/reduce/move to Threads or Forum Channels.
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.
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.
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.
Email works very well for this. I do wish my neighborhood association would move to a Google group, because right now it’s a massive CC list. Mail hosts tend not to like that very much, and it’s not the most privacy-minded solution.
Several other active communities I’m a member of are on mailing lists. The one that switched to a forum platform with email notifications of new threads died fast.
Thankfully one of the neighbors “owns” the list and sends out an email with updates any time it changes. You’re supposed to reach everyone by reply-all-ing to the latest one. To unsubscribe, you email the organizer; to subscribe, you ask a neighbor to email them. So, could be better, but could also be worse.
Is it though? Facebook and nextdoor are free. That's incredibly hard to compete with.
I'd be interested in building something like this, but even at $100/year, you really can't even afford to advertise for it, so I can't see how one builds distribution.
It sucks that for cash strapped community groups / rescue orgs / etc everyone defaults to facebook, but disrupting that requires a way to make money that isn't advertising, and I can't figure it out :shrug:
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.
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.
Building it is the easy part, getting people to use it is the hard part. I built a HN clone for a client that was intended for entrepreneurship discussions, it didn't take off.
I built Jonline for this purpose. If you’d be interested in deploying it, I’d love to help. https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline
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.)
IMO the problem with Discord is it encourages forming cliques and community fragmentation. I think anyone who's used Discord for long enough has seen their favorite server inevitably add so many channels that the discussion gets spread out and diluted to the point that the server feels dead, even though it might have hundreds of members. At the same time, your most active users eventually form their own group DMs with other active users that they get along with, while posting less and less in the main server.
Discord actively encourages this by making it so easy to form group DMs and splinter servers (a good thing from a user's perspective, but a community-killer from the server's perspective). And financially, it's probably more profitable for Discord to do it that way too.
Some of that is the nature of community building in general. Facebook communities split all the time, and/or move to DMs (whether FB Messenger or WhatsApp or something else) and back.
In terms of dilution, that's something you can generally fight. There's a lot more tools in today's Discord to mitigate "too many channels". Threads and Forum Channels can help. There are moderation actions that you can take like "we're going to move this channel read-only because it hasn't been active since X, consider new conversations in #more-general-channel or threads of it".
In my experience one of the biggest causes of dilution that's less obvious is your server's notification strategy. If a server @everyone or @here or @channel enough, I have a tendency to mute that server and read it less often, and I'm not alone on that. Good use of easy opt-in/opt-out roles for notifications is key moderation tool. In my opinion, a lot of the best servers entirely disable @everyone/@here/@channel, have dedicated notifications for alerts, and have a dedicated Announcements channel for any "everyone notification" (but without @everyone mentions) that can be followed or muted separately from the rest of @-mentions (more personal replies, for instance).
Anyway, if you seem to be facing too much dilution, the other key is to ask people what they need, if they are happy with the current channel layout, and if they have suggestions on channels to merge/reduce/move to Threads or Forum Channels.
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.
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.
Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp are all good tools for this.
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.
We actually have an old fashioned email list. It's a Google Group, because Yahoo Groups shut down.
Email works very well for this. I do wish my neighborhood association would move to a Google group, because right now it’s a massive CC list. Mail hosts tend not to like that very much, and it’s not the most privacy-minded solution.
Several other active communities I’m a member of are on mailing lists. The one that switched to a forum platform with email notifications of new threads died fast.
Yeah, cc lists are a nightmare for so many reasons, not least because you can't easily get off/unsubscribe.
Thankfully one of the neighbors “owns” the list and sends out an email with updates any time it changes. You’re supposed to reach everyone by reply-all-ing to the latest one. To unsubscribe, you email the organizer; to subscribe, you ask a neighbor to email them. So, could be better, but could also be worse.
Everyone older moved from Facebook to WhatsApp years ago. The youngsters went to Insta instead.
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.
Is it though? Facebook and nextdoor are free. That's incredibly hard to compete with.
I'd be interested in building something like this, but even at $100/year, you really can't even afford to advertise for it, so I can't see how one builds distribution.
It sucks that for cash strapped community groups / rescue orgs / etc everyone defaults to facebook, but disrupting that requires a way to make money that isn't advertising, and I can't figure it out :shrug:
Most sports I'm involved in use https://www.spond.com/
Don't bother with Meetup. It is a sad ruin of what it used to be. They have enshittified at light speed.
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.