sanae   (SF)

There have been basically two things keeping me from completely getting rid of facebook. One was events: now this has been replaced by Partiful, which does all the things I needed facebook events to do and doesn't do the things I don't like.

The second is maybe harder. Facebook groups. I'm never actually involved in more than 1-2 but it seems exceptionally hard to move the conversation elsewhere

Jul 6 at 7:24amWeb
Show threadsanae   (SF)Jul 6
What it needs to have:
- extremely easy to use
- comfortable and non-intimidating for people of all generations and levels of technical knowledge
- easy to find
- possible to have several conversations going on simultaneously without talking over each other
Show threadsanae   (SF)Jul 6
The main alternate solution I've seen for a community-oriented discussion platform is Slack, which has several problems:
- less technical people often won't use it
- people who use it for work often don't want to use it
- the channel model doesn't work very well unless everyone understands the etiquette of using slack which people usually don't unless they regularly use this type of software for other reasons
- devolves into people needing to post the same message in every channel
Show threadsanae   (SF)Jul 6
sometimes discord, which has the same or similar problems
Show threadAndrew FisterJul 6
@sanae Another alternative is Whatsapp, which my kids' school PTA uses. It has decent support for channelized group discussions.
Show threadI'd rather be readingJul 6

@sanae interesting perspective as I'm in several communities who use free-tier Slack which has downsides, most notably that messages older than 90 days are lost so there's institutional amnesia.

I've wanted to move onto Zulip or Matrix but I fear they're both too technical for any community that is not tech/maker-focused.

Show threadsanae   (SF)Jul 7
@samfirke oh yeah losing messages is an issue but I feel like that generally hasn't even been the biggest issue
Show threadAndrew FisterJul 6
@sanae Same for me with Facebook. I check one group which I have bookmarked and never look at my feed anymore.