Ask HN: Is there a self-hosted alternative to Facebook groups?

HAHAHA oh god nostalgia. Also reminds me of mybb which is more themable. Remember the days you can become a forum owner simply with a domain name and free hosting with cpanel.

This is the biggest problem to overcome. Social media has a monopoly on user bases and platform adoption because they cater to everything poorly, and acquire other better platforms, while strategically maintaining and retaining all the attention of a huge volume of users no matter how bad they get.

It's a very big hurdle to overcome. The best way is to generate vibrance within a niche, promote it in the right places, and to really cater to users, and then maybe after years of losing money and being stressed, you'll have something notable, provided it hasn't devolved into just another huge clone of Facebook by then.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm in a number of private groups that consistently get hit with random auto moderator false positive flags on Fb. After enough of these flags, the group gets closed.

I'm wondering if a third party groups app that supports Facebook auth could be a gateway out of Zuckland while leveraging the Facebook network effect.