You're correct, but this is quite a boring response. If no one tried to make the world a better place, the world would never get better. It is an uphill battle, but I wish the OP luck all the same.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
the unreasonable man.
Thus you must convince users that 1) FB is clearly inferior to your product (e.g. many important hidden demerits) or 2) your product adds something essential that's absent in FB. Otherwise, why switch?
This is kind of a cost-benefit issue though. The benefits of having a local community outweigh the negatives of the platform having its own issues.
If your issues on the platform cause you to ditch it, which ruins your community, than what have you actually done?
I believe when it comes to anything that is not-for-profit, that the path of least resistance the only path. Therefore moving off of Facebook is simply not a consideration.
Very near sighted, but an actual problem government, good governance, has struggled with absolutely. Part of the techno fascism is emerging because people are entirely easily manipulated with todays egg prices and not tomorrows suffering of human rights.
I keep hearing this. What does this mean?
My guess would be "a system in which big technology firms can effectively censor speech with coordination from the state". But I think those that use it mean something else.
If you're looking for a better term, we could call it "technocratic anti-liberalism" to perhaps cover all the bases. People are attempting to describe the current situation in which the wealthiest humans in all of history are supporting an anti-liberal executive by making financial donations to anti-liberal leadership and making changes to their products to further the messages thereof, e.g. broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.
"Wealthy" as in "holding more personal wealth than the bottom half of the US population"; "anti-liberal" as in "espousing and acting in opposition to classical liberal values of consent of the governed and equality under law by denying the validity of elections, attempting to overthrow the US liberal democratic government with force, pardoning foot soldiers found guilty of such an attack, utilizing king-like executive direction to undermine the highest law of the land, avoiding all punishment for his own guilt, and so forth.
That's how I interpret the term.
Today it is "Keir Starmer is a fascist" (Sci-fi writer Charlie Stross), "the local people department is fascist" (BLM supporters), I half expect to hear "Jesus was a fascist" although certainly that accusation is leveled at his followers.
There's something seductive about the imagery in Pink Floyd's The Wall and V is for Vendetta that is evocative of the period. Perhaps today's political systems are on the brink of failure due to inaction the way that the remnants of European aristocracy were. But we're not going to face what we're up against using "thought stopping" terms.
One could make the case that the real problem with "people worried about the price of eggs" is a lack of meaning and that Trump's talk about going to Mars or annexing Greenland addresses that more directly, as do the fantasies of fascism which can elevate ordinary feelings of despair.
As for Musk, I think he's mentally ill, I think he may have what I've got.
Our language is bending as it ever does to help people explain these political shifts—often people who see what's happening but don't have much education on the matters of history, political science, philosophy. Bear in mind that 21% of US adults are illiterate, and far fewer are even equipped to read, say, Thomas Paine.
We need ways of talking about the values that are winning (nationalist theocratic autocracy) and the ones that are not (the open society, secular liberal democracy), and the word "liberalism" in the US has beenn so tarnished, so I think "fascism" today has come to mean "anti-liberal." I'll take what I can get.
> Over 90% of political donations from employees at major tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have gone to Democrats since 2004.
> In 2020, 90% of contributions from the internet industry went to Democrats, while only 9% went to Republicans.
> However, there are signs of a slight shift in recent years:
> In 2024, 15% of donations from employees at major tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta went to Republican causes, up from 5% in 2020 and 8% in 2018.
It sounds like your definition is "a few visible billionaires donated to someone I don't like"
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.
Look, I get it. You have your politics and that's fine. But if you want to win hearts and minds, try another strategy. It's all just so exhausting and people check out.
> broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes
This is a fact, not a rhetorical device.
Musk — one of the most powerful people in Washington — doing things like throwing a sieg heil salute, supporting the AfD, claiming that "Hitler was a communist,"[1] and calling for the execution of a government witness[2].
Thiel proclaiming to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and then half of Silicon Valley showing up to party with him[3].
Techno fascism is what it says on the tin: technologists who are very happy with fascism for the sake of money and power. (Just don't call them fascists, they hate that.)
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leade...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Whelp, we know which one is going to win then. An economic benefit now wins the vast majority of the time.
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?
- 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?
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 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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 might happen again. :)
it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned
https://interestingengineering.com/science/jadav-payeng-the-...
It's important to note that Jadav didn't get other people to change and join his crusade before it happened. He merely went out and did what he wanted. People were inspired by seeing it happen.
People aren't going to be inspired by yet another social network touting federation and other technical mumbo-jumbo, because it doesn't help them do anything they weren't already doing on Facebook.
This whole conversation is very strange to me indeed.
Because you’re not engaging with the point?
For starters, the original claim was to “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Beyond that, the point of my reply was to show that it is indeed possible to make the world better without communicating with anyone else (contrary to the original claim).
Anything else is your own addition.
And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.
If you use a platform nobody uses to try and change the world you won't change it just like if you tried to plant trees without using seeds.
Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.
The whole thread is about limited and well-defined communities, not the world. What the OP wants is specifically “isolated”.
> like planting some seeds
Spending thirty years planting a 550 hectare forest and restoring wildlife to it is not “planting some seeds”. Please don’t be reductive.
> Real change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Change is change. You don’t get to define someone’s life work, which was more meaningful and impactful than most of us will ever achieve, not “real” to fit your narrow definition.
If we were discussing everyone who has lived and will ever live, the current population of the world would be a limited snapshot. Same if we were discussing every planet and civilisation in the fictional world of Start Trek.
But we’re not discussing that. Making up something we’re not talking about to attack what we are is called a straw man argument.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781581
What you’re arguing against is not the point I was making. My point in this thread is way up there: it replies to someone saying you cannot make the world better without communicating with other humans, by presenting someone who on their own improved the world more than most (if not all) Facebook groups ever will.
When I used the word “limited”, it was clearly in reference to it being an “isolated” specific community and not everyone.
I don’t think it’s worth either of our times to continue, though. We’ve strayed too much from the original point.
A good evening (or your equivalent time of day) to you.
What gets people engaged is stupid anger. Even stuff I agree with on some fundamental political level, the social media version is just stressed out, to the point of being ineffective and often wrong in detail.
Centralized as driven social media can’t go out of business fast enough.
Saying communications were more effective 20 years ago is highly debatable and certainly an argument tinged with nostalgia.
Of course it's debatable because reality can be measured in multiple dimensions.
Is it faster, yes. Is filtering out the massive amounts of bullshit communications easier? Not really, especially with content aware spambots than can be ran by the millions. It's easy to get crushed by bullshit asymmetry. For me this makes most communications less effective because I have to spend even more time figuring out the actual poster and their motivations.
They may share a technology platform, but they are not the same.
If you have children you'll see social media (#2) is incredibly useful and facilitates greatly in communication. We're much more connected than our parents were thanks to these apps.
I use it for parent stuff and parties. It just does what it supposed to. See pictures of kids (private group). Get birthday invites. Just go to the group. No algorithm or engagement farming. It just works.
And marketplace has been a game changer.
What's better? Simpler to setup and maintain for local businesses or daycares. One daycare used a different app and it was awful. Janky, weird, missing features and the teachers complain about it.
A better world is subjective.
Yeah, obviously. So part of the OP's task will be selling their communities on why switching away from Facebook is a good thing. Given everything that's going on, now is a good opportunity to do that. But before they can do that, they need to know what to switch to, which is the topic of this thread.