To get better answers, you need to flesh out all the features of Facebook that your communities are using. E.g. Shared event calendars? Groups? Private Messaging? Video hosting for users to upload vids of community events? Live feeds? Etc.

Look at the left side of navigation topics to help you enumerate and think about it: https://www.facebook.com/help/130979416980121/

Do you expect those ~50k to create new logins for the new platform? Or do they sign in with their existing "Facebook ID" to avoid hassle of new account creation? Do they need a phone app? If it's website only from the smartphone web browser, do you need web push for notifications? Facebook interaction with others has convenient lookup from the phones' contact listing. Web-only site doesn't have straightforward access to smartphone's address book (without PhoneGap). Etc.

If your communities are using a lot of those social networking features, it means trying to use Mastodon as a substitute for Facebook is going to be a very incomplete solution.

Of course, alternative solutions are not going to fully match Facebook but you still need to think of the threshold for a minimum viable feature set so your 50k users won't reject it.

You can build out a million features for Facebook parity, but it doesn't mean much if you have low traction.

There were also cases where a simple Wordpress (or whatever) site would have worked, but the owners went all in on replicating FB features, instead of making sure users actually went to their new property at all.

https://www.joinordiefilm.com/

the goal is to get people to join clubs, so you want some kind of service which has a specific mission and the minimal part is important. You want to put blinders on your users. You don't want them to get served irrelevant ads and notifications. I'd consider this site

https://fingerlakesrunners.org/

which is basically a calendar of events that they host; they have forums but people aren't chewing the fat, they're having discussions that are focused around the events that

https://forum.fingerlakesrunners.org/

You don't have the horrific moderation problems that come out of "is it fake or not?" or "is this socially acceptable or not?" because the real question is "is this relevant to the events we put on?" in which case the problem of "your free speech is (in my view) your obnoxious behavior" which gets worse the more purposeless a site is.

Do YOU want to move off of Facebook for some reason, or do people want to move off of Facebook for some reason. MOST people in the US, especially in a rural are are not going to quit an app because say the CEO of a company is friendly to the President. You have an uphill battle, and at best you are going to shed a majority of users. Facebook is a popular platform, especially for those 30+ people in a small town that use local groups.

Out of ~30 people, I got precisely 3 people to switch. No one else cared, no one else wanted the hassle of switching. I even got a few comments along the lines of "but no-one I know is on Signal" etc. I ended up re-installing WhatsApp because I decided that the loss of contact with so many people was worse than any privacy worries I had at the time.

It’s of course not trivial but one has to wonder if there’s something there.

Us tecchies (typical HN members) literally can't imagine what non-tech people go through, when encountering tech.

It's terrifying, humiliating, and intimidating. The reaction from us techs, does nothing to help, as we tend to sneer at them, and do everything we can, to humiliate them. Fairly typical bullying, but we don't want to admit it, because we were always bullied, and don't want to admit that we are just doing the same to others.

Most folks painfully learn rote, then get terrified of changes. This is why so many folks don't want to upgrade, or add new features. Just learning the ones they have mastered, was difficult enough. They can't deal with doing it on a regular basis (like most of us tecchies do).

Until we accept this, and keep it in mind, when we design solutions, we won't get much traction. People who do understand it, and design for it, tend to make a lot of money.

This is also why we need to introduce changes S L O W L Y, even when we feel that it doesn't make sense.

Basic human empathy. It's kinda rare, these days.

Most people did not, in fact learn how to use computers http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

What might actually be cool would be a common set of design principles that become used across many apps and ecosystems - it would make switching much easier.

People are already used to the little "hamburger menu" three dots thing in UI (can also be three lines) often in the upper right for better or worse

Heck, we see this with Mastodon and Bluesky, their content is very thin in my experience (even if Twitter's is also thinner than it used to be at least with the mostly tech-related content I followed).

   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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

As for Musk, I think he's mentally ill, I think he may have what I've got.

That said, I've seen autists take a spaz and go off on an anti-semitic rant that they didn't really mean.

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...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42773678

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

it does seem unlikely to work though, for the reasons you mentioned

It might happen again. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Engaging in political censorship of their platform in favour of the President" is a little more than being "friendly".

Free Speech in the US is dying. Ignore it at your own peril.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/16/rogan-misses-the-mark-ho...

It will be years before these people realize how much the media was controlled from 2020-2024 specifically in favor of one political party. For a lot of people this was the first time it was extremely obvious and going back to Bush and Obama social media and the internet in general weren't considered "serious" political campaign locations. I certainly dont remember either Bush's or Obama's election being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis. Of course there was vitriol but it was so tame compared to today.

Do you mean the party who just used the inauguration to have a senior government member throw nazi salutes? The party whose presidents first actions included pardoning dozens of members of fascist groups?

You can't really be choosing this moment to complain about calling these people nazis??

And that paragraph would not be objectionable to many people in that political grouping.

Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. You can set up your own site and set up your own servers if need be. People have been getting their ideas out there before social media and even when the mainstream media wouldn’t cover them.

That’s how the civil rights movement came to prominence.

That was a reasonable stance historically. Only the government had real power to control speech.

Now a tiny number of platforms have a huge amount of power. They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication.

You use personal outreach and then you build up from there. There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc

Which are now largely dependent on social media and the like to reach people.

Church's somewhat less so because they do have services that people physically go to. Most campaign and advocacy groups work online, and for some social media is their main focus. They have to go where people are.

Absolute bullshit. It has never been easier in history to publish your own thoughts for the consumption of anyone who is interested in reading them. You can make your own website and put just about whatever you want on it. You can write and publish pamphlets or books with print on demand services. You can record audio or video with your phone and put it on your website or just send it directly to people. You can walk down to the town square and say pretty much whatever you want.

You absolutely don't need to be on Facebook or Twitter or ANY social networks to exercise your free speech. None of these companies has power over any means of communication other than their own platforms. You don't have to use their platforms.

Yes, but you can reach far fewer people if you do not.

This is well on the way to arguing that you are free to say what you want in a sealed room.

Your argument seems to be that the New York Times has no choice but to publish my op-ed, because otherwise how will anyone find it?

You have to put in the work. Major changes happen by people getting thier voice out before social media

So long as you do it in a sound proofed room.

> While users who type "#Democrat" or "#Democrats" see no results, the hashtag "Republican" returns 3.3 million posts on the social media platform.

> By manually searching Instagram for "Democrats", rather than clicking on a hashtag, users are greeted by a screen reading "we've hidden these results".

> "Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content," it says.

I can’t fault for someone making the attempt for whatever reason but if the reason is tied to politics I think that it will fail. People ultimately attempting a platform shift for political reasons like this will find that most people are 1) simply not as dogmatic politically as the activist types that would propose a change like this even if they are “on the same team” and 2) people are unwilling to leave a system of comfort for a novel system that works even slightly differently to their comfort zone to essentially do the same thing.

Subjectively, that feels wildly untrue. Do you have any numbers to back this up?

Agreed. Also not everyone realizes WhatsApp and IG are also part of Facebook. Aside from elderly folks, almost now one I know uses traditional facebook. However, almost all Millenials and GenZ I know use IG. Practically everyone I know who has overseas family/friends uses WhatsApp.

Also see https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... just for kicks :)

maybe i sound like i'm wearing a tin hat but i don't totally trust their active user numbers or believe that facebook is growing active users in the US. like am i in there bc i have a facebook acct from years ago to run ads and accidentally clicked a fb link once last year? what if i viewed a facebook ad. at some point somebody is deciding what counts as active and i'd bet a dollar that person is incentivized for numbers to be big and monotonic.

in my experience it's good to poke at numbers that don't match your intuition. that's how you get to reality.

i know your example was farcical, but if you know a lot of people and 100% of them play racquetball, you should seriously question someone who is telling you that football is actually the most popular sport, especially if they have economic incentives for you thinking that's the truth. it's just math.

OP didn't give say politics had anything to do with it. Let them nerd up if they want to.

Centralization around specific platforms has plusses and minuses. Having alternatives drives innovation.

I disagree, GP's comment is typical of HN. The discussions you've mentioned do happen frequently, but surely you've noticed that at least half the comments (and often the top rated ones) will inevitably be "it can't be done so why even try".

So: my advice is to not think of it as all-or-nothing. You will not be able to move 300k people off of Facebook overnight. This is somewhat akin to every IT migration project ever: it always takes longer than you think, and is not always a linear process from "fewer people migrated" to "more people migrated".

It's also akin to community organizing: there is no substitute for actually talking to people about it, especially in the initial phases. Or: high-touch sales, where you may initially need to spend a lot of energy and time per person successfully moved over. The other common thing here is that you will hear "no" a lot, which is a valuable experience anyways (but will be frustrating).

Also: unfortunately, no one will care if it's self-hosted or federated, outside of niche tech circles. They will care about whether they can reach the people they want to reach, and whether the user experience is good or not. This is reality: talking about these points will not help you.

Some things you'll probably need to do:

- Identify a single credible alternative platform. - Identify specific groups of people who are willing to be early "de-adopters". For instance: a local youth group, a sports club, whatever. Ideally you are a part of this group already; you then have a much better chance. Businesses will likely say no, so you want community groups. - Within those groups, identify champions: people who care about the same thing you care about, and are willing to commit time and effort to help. - Together with your champions, build a toolkit that allows you to scale up your efforts. This may be guides on how to talk to people about the change - what works, what doesn't. This might be instructions for setting up a specific platform. It might be communications channels, leaflets / flyers for putting up in public places, whatever.

https://nextdoor.com/

which is very much about community organizing but it has an aura of "people spreading rumors about bicycle thefts at the movie theater downtown (why don't they call the cops?)", the woman who radiates creepy signs of precarity (is cleaning up and looking for the phone number of the people who are suspected to run an illegal landfill) and then posts screen shots of the creepy come-ons she gets from guys who want to be her sugar daddy, etc.

Maybe there's a space for a platform that specifically targets small, community, in person kinds of organizations, maybe even targeted to a particular geographical area; something like Meetup but just a little less structured.

Here's a fair sized local organization (has more than one run a month) that has a good site

https://fingerlakesrunners.org/

But making that scalable is tricky; somebody in the club's leadership is a Wordpress pro. $5 a month would be cheap, but people are niggardly. If you're a web tech native owning a domain name is table stakes, but I think you'd lose 80% of "normies" even the phone-dependent "internet natives" if they had to get a domain name. There is a certain amount of panic over the breakdown of community organizations, see the line of research described in this film

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/join_or_die

and rather than getting $5 a month out of people who think they can't afford it, getting funding from somebody like the United Way (for a particular area) or the Knight Foundation might be a better idea.

Nextdoor dot com is actually even more toxic than a lot of Facebook is and I would avoid at all costs.

I wouldn't mind ads but I'd want to see ads of the old-school sponsorship variety (the running club could see ads for the local running shoe store, one of the local grocery stores, an overfunded non-profit like the United Way, etc.) as opposed to the auction-based, personalized ads that you'd see on reddit. Similarly if a sidebar on the running club had a link to a local board game or ham radio club I'd think that's OK but the mission on my mind is to get people to join the ham radio club where they're going to do comms for the running club, not to maximize time on site.

So what happens on Nextdoor is that there's sort of a vicious cycle where normal people show up, get grossed out by the toxic ones and leave.

Pay for it with ads from local businesses, and give it away for free at all those stores. Get your regional Chamber of Commerce to help set you up with connections and sales channels.

At first, I thought it was a little bit silly to start a print magazine in 2020, but honestly, it's amazing and everyone loves it. I look forward to each new edition. And they become hard to find cause people grab them so quickly!

Huge hit, highly recommend. But remember: it's a huge hit not because it's a print magazine; it's a hit because the execution of the couple that manage it. They're top-notch, and it's a "hobby" for them, not their main jobs.

Because it has an editor (and you could break the work up amongst a few people) you don't have the same problems that listservs have (spam) or nextdoor (gossip and paranoia).

Substack or mailchimp would be fine for v1.

If you don't want to distribute something on paper or cover any costs, this is a fine place to start.

Organise the newspaper on the new platform, advertise it on both.

If all the complainers have to move to the new platform to complain, or chat about it adjacent to you thats where they will end up.

I use to love these artsy free papers but even my elderly parents don't read the local newspaper anymore that grew up reading the paper.

The local paper is a very small niche item at this point.

The only way I can think to do this is to hang old school flyers in an area of the city/town that attracts the people you want in your community.

Whether they'd be receptive to share their secret sauce and let a thousand Front Porches bloom is another question though, guess you could ask them! :)

You can check it out at https://dateit.com/ I’d be happy to offer you and maybe some others here free access to our premium features so you can experience everything the app has to offer. Just create an account and email me at [email protected] and mention this post.

Their use of good old fashioned www links and SMS messages makes it easy for everyone to share and join events. No app and no Partiful account necessary.

They also have simple and good event privacy model, group scheduling, reminders, Venmo based ticket system, and group chat.

It’s taken over almost completely in my social circles and I’m all for it.

It seems like they might have group organizing features now, but I'd be concerned about adopting it for a group without a clear idea of how they're going to make money

> Partiful does not make money yet. They are a venture-backed startup with many millions of dollars of funding. They will eventually offer a premium version, an ad-supported model, or be acquired by a larger company like Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Snapchat, or one of these other potential acquirers.

Basically, enjoy it while you can. There is nothing wrong with using a free service like this while you can. Best case IMO is that they monetize it with low fees and have a product that is actually worth paying for.

I've never used Facebook for anything, but the above four tools work very well for us.

The point seems to be that you can pick whatever service you want and will still get the information because it’s repeated across channels. The manager needs to post to all four, but everyone else picks one.

The email list is probably the single most important part of the tech stack actually.

When they eventually get tired of managing all this, they will eventually need to hand the reigns off to someone else. Hopefully someone will step up, because if someone doesn't it won't matter if the group is in 4 places or one.

* Look into hosting a forum (e.g. phpBB). Forums are excellent because they don't lose old information like facebook does. When someone says "Hey what's the policy on dogs?" three years later I can search "dogs" and find the answer. Downside: They're not pretty, not full of pictures and no infinite scrollingz. sadge alfababies. Kidding aside, if you do try a forum, be sure to not offer a bunch of niche subtopics. The more subtopics the more stale the forum feels overall. Just stick to one main topic until someone asks for a second.

* IRC chat. I hosted an IRC group for several years at work and it worked great. We only killed it when we decided to move to an enterprise communication app.

It would be cool if they had a scraper that could pre-populate the system with some content from Facebook.

"Generate a quick (salacious|funny|sad) story involving (random group member) and (random object) happening at (randomly selected location)."

Never had the opportunity to test it, but it's been developped by the fine folks of framasoft as an alternative to facebook for community/event organization. Might fit the bill for you.

that will drain users from Facebook instantly! i can already see the flood of people coming. /s

This is enough to tell me it's not gonna be suitable.

Their software are all absolutely awful because their organization follows the skewed principle that FOSS is enough to "sell" and they don't take UX into consideration at all.

Literally none of their alternatives are successful, always for this reason.

I have no idea how it makes money, which is sadly worrying these days...

-most of what you need is basically something similar to Facebook Groups (nowadays, I bookmark Facebook Groups for the 3 groups I follow, and skip the main feed, which is basically all ads and random memes these days)

-you need a platform with mass adoption - FB got it w/ free accounts back in the day, connecting old classmates or whatnot. So a new platform would need to be free for average users

-simple signup - single "Server" - i.e. can't have the weaknesses of individual forum server software or even mastodon/federated solutions (not enough users, hard to setup)

-some way to monetize - i.e. the sins of Facebook can be traced (in part) to reliance on ads to monetize. so maybe charge for admins who want to set up their own group? It would be be an order of magnitude less income than Facebook but maybe sustainable if you keep the scope of such a site/service small.

The younger gen these days use a lot of discord, older gen uses slack, but the way they are set up with individual "servers" seems clunky to me, and no web interface but it's relatively close.

Decidim is a political social network that allows communities to have a free technology, with democratic guarantees and designed for the common good. While this technology can be installed with knowledge of Ruby on Rails and some knowledge of servers, so perfectly self-hosted, there are also organisations that offer it in SaaS format at a very competitive price. Also, you can federated differents Decidims:)

The success of newer social platforms like Discord is mostly people creating new groups there, rather than wholesale migrations. Facebook itself followed that pattern in earlier days.

That said, your main point is solid.

What does that mean? I think we need a lot more context on what you want to do. Are you the IT administrator for the county and want to find alternative ways of disseminating announcements? Or are you just a citizen that wants people to chat somewhere else?