@juliette That is a good question. Locally we have the same problem here, it's all Facebook, and I wish it were not.

@juliette my problem exactly...

@juliette

I've seen something's like that in Telegram groups but discoverability suffered a lot when they killed search by proximity, around last September.

@juliette just tagging along here to see if anything comes up :)
I have been considering spinning up a discourse forum (https://www.discourse.org/) for small local communities (book-club, school, music scene etc), and have had some success with rooms on matrix chat, but lacking the events in both is a hard sell.

@juliette I have seen some local FB communities moving to nextdoor.com. not sure who owns this service though and how independent it really is

@juliette Unfortunately, if you want to join local groups, Facebook and Whatsapp are THE instruments. Especially, because they are easy to use.
For most people who are non-techy, non-internet, the Fediverse is too complicated. And local groups or topics live because of the high number of people who don't spend the whole day in the internet or on social media.
I have a silent, sleepy, and passive FB account only for knowing what happens in my region.

@juliette

Bisher haben mir alle Ratgeber gesagt, ich solle halt einen hashtag für die gewünschte Region benutzen. Aber ...

@juliette The thing is that so many people already have a facebook account, so the barrier is low. Creating a new account - on any platform - is difficult for many people, and platforms like fediverse or matrix very much so with the requirement of selecting an instance.

@juliette My very rural town thinks it has a strong Facebook presence, because it has a Facebook page owned and managed by someone out of state that is fairly active. And it's true, you can generally find what you need to know, if you sift through all the vitriol that clutters the page.

My little town's real social center? A literal message board in a parking lot. If you need to buy or sell something, you take an index card and pin it up. Event coming up? Pin a flyer. I've even seen random comments just pinned there for fun.

We have a strong Mennonite population, which is probably the reason it still stands, but everyone uses the community board.

@juliette we have a pretty strong WhatsApp community with a huge number of subgroups. It's super effective for different interests and purposes.

@juliette I have discovered myself asking this same question, and so I have not found really anything that's as popular as FB; the mention of other technologies tends to send administrators running.

@juliette Not going to be a solution (because of the effort involved) but the local community in Haringey in London has a dedicated online forum that was in active use when I used to live there (nb we left 5 years ago). It was great - people donating/selling furniture; getting and giving recommendations for builders, decorators, etc.

We miss it greatly in our new location in London where there is no equivalent.

Here's an entry on Wikipedia for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harringay_Online?wprov=sfti1#History

@juliette Nextdoor is annoying and trackers up the ying yang, plus no politics, also advertising.
So I looked up ChatGPT, this is not looking good? "Who created ChatGPT, the world's most advanced chatbot? It's not Microsoft or Google, but instead, a little-known company called OpenAI." AI?

@juliette bad time to ask, for the UK, what with the stupid online safety act that's going to put the kibosh on these sorts of services.

@juliette This is something I have lots of hope for seeing a federated version of too and do not know of any examples currently. My ideal would be the tried and tested, simple format of a forum. Discourse works tremendously well in my experience and some of the most active communities I'm part of outside of facebook are using that (gardening especially). If they were federated, it would make them less of isolated islands.

@juliette my community uses a paid platform. We’re looking at self-hosting Humbub as a replacement which is cheaper than what we currently use but definitely not cheap. It’s hard to beat free 😅

@juliette

For a long time I'm wondering about the same. Anyone here tried #framasoft #mobilizon?

@juliette

Great question!

I deal with the same issue; local FB groups are very active and helpful.

This was an interesting experiment:

@davidoclubb setting up an "airgapped" mastodon server for students; that is, it's not connected to other servers.

https://toot.wales/@davidoclubb/113640905817478950

@juliette Even in a big town, alternative social media is going to skew techie. Network effects are pretty insurmountable

@juliette The ones I know are small bulletin board type systems run privately by a neighbor with the capacity to do it. I know this is what Nextdoor tries to be...but it's all "I saw a teenager in a black hoodie trying a car door" type stuff.