Alison WilderDear Everybody,
PLEASE for the love of god stop posting your events only on Facebook.
Thanks,
Me
Mark T. Tomczak@alisynthesis This is a hole in my online space post-Facebook: is there a good alternative online to what FB offers for events on group pages?
That may, unfortunately, be best-of-breed right now.
@mark If you have events that need to be posted, I would absolutely recommend doing it on your own website. There's just no good reason to trust a major corporation to have your best interest in mind.
There's not another social platform that replicates what Facebook has done there, and I honestly think that's a good thing. Moving from Facebook to the next big platform is just a recipe for another Facebook.
My two cents! 🙂
@alisynthesis That makes sense, but almost no theater I know in town has their own website. if they don't just have a Facebook wall, they have a static site set up one time that gets updated quarterly with new photos of performances because that's all they know how to do.
The forces that made Facebook huge haven't changed: users don't want to maintain websites. They don't want to learn HTML, they don't want to learn how to publish, they definitely don't want to learn Internet security and want to outsource "We didn't get hacked for the sin of telling people when our performances were using a computer on the same LAN as our theater director's personal desktop" to someone else.
This is a non-trivial problem to solve. 😞
@mark I totally get that. That said, it's about as easy to set up a WordPress.com or squarespace site as it is to set up a Facebook page. No html required.
That's not how I would do it, but if it needs to be super cheap and easy, I would say that's a way better situation than Facebook.
@alisynthesis That makes sense. I should look into what that feels like these days.
We could really use something that you can drop in a box and is self-securing. All the benefits of local ownership with all the benefits of outsourcing security would be something close to the Grail, I think.
@mark I hear you! For work, I build websites for small and medium sized businesses, and I know how tough it can be.
But seriously, check out wordpress.com and the plugin I sent. I build self-hosted WordPress sites, and although I have personal reservations about WordPress.com for reasons that probably won't matter at all to you, I think it's a really great service for someone in your situation.
@mark and I do recommend a hosted service for a website If you don't have the will or the budget in your organization to perform maintenance. A lot of people seem to think the only cost of a custom website is the upfront cost, which is not true at all.
But a squarespace or a wordpress.com will handle all of the security, maintenance, etc. there will be frustrations when you want to do things that aren't possible, but overall I think it's a pretty good trade-off if your alternative is Facebook.
@mark eg https://wordpress.com/plugins/browse/events
I guarantee that setting this up is a job that anyone who can use a mouse and type can do!
resipiscent@mark @alisynthesis Nobody remembers to check a website unless it aggregates multiple events. There are quite a few free calendars, this is the way to go since the point of in-person public events is to create new community. It's a bit of work to post to each of these with their different templates but I do it for every concert at the Peacock Lounge in SF.
For theater in particular, there is
https://www.broadwayworld.com/submitnews.cfm
For music, free calendars:
https://www.songkick.com/concerts/42377347-elliott-levin-at-peacock-lounge
https://ra.co/events/2084029
https://dothebay.com/events/2025/2/13/elliott-levin-ensemble-so-ar-tanukispidercat-chlorine-aroma-tickets
https://discover.events.com/us/california/san-francisco/e/music/peacock-lounge-438792648
https://groups.io/g/Brutalsfx/message/165
https://eastbayexpress.com/events-calendar/#
@resipiscent @alisynthesis I wonder if anyone's working on this in the Fediverse space?
A Fediverse calendar that let you aggregate events by interest or geographic region feels like not-a-bad-fit for the protocol.
@mark @resipiscent it's not about people remembering to check a website. It's about doing outreach that points back to your website.
Facebook is withering, and you WILL need a new strategy. I have my doubts whether the social internet will ever be as consolidated around one platform again, thank goodness.
I did just learn about a new federated event platform! https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
@mark @alisynthesis There's also https://gath.io/ I tried creating events there for awhile but it was cumbersome, nobody wanted to respond/engage with it. It feels a little intrusive in that it presumed I wanted to treat the event as a poll with poll results. I don't. I want a calendar with more events than my own. There are Signal threads for local underground shows that work well because they're just a list of flyers (until people try to chatter about politics, but each user can just block those folks). Less is more... in fact the most useful, oldest, underground concert calendar in the SF Bay Area is the work of one person:
https://jon.luini.com/thelist/date.html
https://jon.luini.com/thelist/date.html
@resipiscent @mark turns out the punks were right all along
@mark @alisynthesis Pre-sale tickets has been its own puzzle, Eventbrite seemed to run the table until Dice.fm came along, I just bought tickets for a show at Cafe Oto in London, enough independent venues use it that it's become useful as a calendar to discover new artists and spaces. Dice lets a venue offer memberships, members get free/discounted tickets. It's specific to art and music, is built to embed video/audio, all around a better UI than Eventbrite.
https://dice.fm/event/92ml3o-mayuko-hino-lucas-granpa-abela-rubber-cement-7th-feb-the-lab-san-francisco-tickets
https://dice.fm/event/92ml3o-mayuko-hino-lucas-granpa-abela-rubber-cement-7th-feb-the-lab-san-francisco-tickets
Dec [{(
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There's a simple PHP calendar called Feber written by @freebliss (developer of Faircamp) but I don't think it was intended to replace Facebook events.
There's a simple PHP calendar called Feber written by @freebliss (developer of Faircamp) but I don't think it was intended to replace Facebook events.
Simon Repp@dec23k thanks for the mention! Feber's indeed built with the intention to stay super simple and more geared towards internal/personal/group calendars (but happy to see it used in whatever way makes sense of course) - no roadmap for federation or such though :) @mark @resipiscent @alisynthesis
@freebliss @dec23k @mark @resipiscent that's awesome! That's exactly the kind of tool people *should* be using for most personal events. Purpose-built, light-weight, self-hosted, not a data hog.
@alisynthesis I agree! Happy to see that the idea appeals to others too, thank you for putting it so kindly! ( ◡‿◡ *)