@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.