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?
(There are doubts the current model survives the next step in investment rounds, an IPO, but we'll see.)
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.
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.
Racket is using https://www.discourse.org/contact , but I'm not sure how civilian friendly it is.
A lot of possible alternatives appear to come close, but none really satisfies it.
The area is very ripe for disruption.
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:
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.