{"id":977,"date":"2019-05-06T00:22:02","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T00:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/achangeiscoming.net\/?p=977"},"modified":"2019-05-06T00:22:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T00:22:02","slug":"activism-beyond-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2019\/05\/06\/activism-beyond-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Activism beyond Facebook: what are the alternatives?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #ff00ff;\">DRAFT!\u00a0 Feedback welcome!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #ff00ff;\">Please do not share broadly yet!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A couple of years ago, in my Open Source Bridge presentation <a class=\"markup--anchor markup--p-anchor\" href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/presentation\/d\/1CzB8Wj1gj8NTlmC4XYbYReXEjsEHPHOTp9-KwXHULD4\/edit#slide=id.g1e73da5d9a_0_1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" data-href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/presentation\/d\/1CzB8Wj1gj8NTlmC4XYbYReXEjsEHPHOTp9-KwXHULD4\/edit#slide=id.g1e73da5d9a_0_1\">Grassroots Activism is Hard. Can Open Source Help?<\/a>, I talked about &#8220;the Facebook dilemma&#8221;.\u00a0 On the one hand, it&#8217;s very easy to set up Facebook groups and events for activism, and that&#8217;s where a lot of people are.\u00a0\u00a0 But on the other hand &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/presentation\/d\/1xEjrn4jP1Lz3jb70G7hClV5SyAmyelm9bhYN68J-A1k\/edit#slide=id.g1e782482de_0_107\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-978\" src=\"http:\/\/achangeiscoming.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2019\/05\/facebook-dilemma.png\" alt=\"The Facebook dilemma: Most people typically don\u2019t see most Facebook posts; Facebook\u2019s tools suck for activism; Many people aren\u2019t on Facebook; Many people don\u2019t feel safe doing activism on Facebook; Facebook is a panoptic \u201creal names\u201d environment; Facebook is an especially hostile environment for activists\" width=\"1640\" height=\"854\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=82\">Facebook has always been a challenging place to do activism<\/a> and over the years has gotten steadily worse and worse.\u00a0 So a lot of activism groups I talk to are looking for alternatives.<\/p>\n<p>The good news is that lots of people and companies with more money than grassroots activism groups are also unhappy on Facebook these days.\u00a0 As a result, there are quite a few products out there that describe themselves as community platforms (or something along those lines).\u00a0 Even though these tools aren&#8217;t generally designed with activism in mind, they support key activism use cases like events and groups focused on different topics &#8211; so they&#8217;re a good complement to action-oriented solutions like <a href=\"https:\/\/getamplify.org\/\">Amplify.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a few that seem promising from an activism perspective.\u00a0 A few up-front caveats:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve only used a couple of these so my first-hand experience is limited.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t yet know good any of these are from an accessibility perspective (except for Dreamwidth, which is great)<\/li>\n<li>Discussions related to activism can get quite intense, and it&#8217;s not clear how good the moderation functionality is on any of these (again, except for Dreamwidth)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>Commercial offerings<\/h1>\n<p>Several of these are big-ticket items that probably aren&#8217;t feasible for a local group.\u00a0 Then again, some of these companies have discounts for non-profits; depending on how they interpret that, some activism groups might qualify.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mightynetworks.com\">Mighty Networks<\/a><\/strong> (\u201ceverything you need to create a safe, private space for your people that&#8217;s all yours\u201d) is a well-funded woman-led startup with a strong focus on helping people monetize the groups they host.\u00a0 Their functionality includes topics, groups, polls, questions, courses, real world and online events (supporting Zoom and Crowdcast), analytics, and (in-process) payments.\u00a0\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mightynetworks.com\/pricing\">Pricing<\/a>: $57\/month for business package (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.crowdcast.io\/e\/why-mighty-business\/1\">described here by CEO Gina Bianchini<\/a>), $30K\/year \u201cpro\u201d with custom apps.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.disciplemedia.com\/\">Disciple Media<\/a><\/strong> (\u201cwhere communities thrive\u201d), from the UK, has groups, feeds, events, analytics, and other social-networky goodness via custom apps. \u00a0It\u2019s currently mobile-only; they\u2019re working on a web solution as well as an API.\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.disciplemedia.com\/case-studies\/\">Case studies<\/a> include a yoga instructor, a football club&#8217;s magazine, and a British MP engaging with constituents. Pricing: starts at 5000\/year?<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.honeycommb.com\/product\">Honeycommb<\/a> <\/strong>(&#8220;a social platform for brands, influencers, and interest based communities&#8221;) includes custom apps and web access, groups, conversation, event, and analytics. \u00a0 Lady Gaga&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.honeycommb.com\/2019\/02\/06\/why-i-love-this-by-the-little-monsters-community\/\">Little Monsters<\/a> community is their highest-profile site. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.honeycommb.com\/pricing-private\">Pricing<\/a>: private networks are free up to 100 users, $3,300\/year for up to 500 users, $20K\/year for up to 10,000.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/hivebrite.com\">Hivebrite<\/a> <\/strong>(\u201cbuilding blocks for creating great communities\u201d) is a general community management tool including events, groups, a CMS and so on, including custom mobile apps. \u00a0They have products focused on alumni groups, professional networks (Microsoft Accelerator uses it), and non-profits. Pricing: starts at $5000\/year?<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/tribe.so\/\">Tribe<\/a><\/strong> (\u201ca powerful community platform, integrated into your product\u201d) has standard functionality (groups, feeds, profiles) in a web interface, and they seem to have put more thought than the others into embedding into other sites; they have widgets, and are one of the few sites that mentions moderation on their features. \u00a0\u00a0Pricing: Premium package (100,000 MAU, integrations with apps like Slack etc) is $400\/month.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mobilize.io\/\">Mobilize<\/a><\/strong> (&#8220;a modern, human-first approach\u00a0to creating powerful, purpose-driven\u00a0membership networks&#8221;) is used by Indivisible for its group leader discussion format.\u00a0 Based on my experiences there and multiple reports of accessibility problems I would <strong>not<\/strong> recommend using it for activism purposes (or anything else really).<\/p>\n<h1>Open Source<\/h1>\n<p>Open source software gives you the option of hosting the community yourself, which has advantages in terms of privacy, control, and potentially cost but will require some technical expertise and ongoing operations and maintenance work. \u00a0 Most also provide some paid hosting options.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.discourse.org\/\">Discourse<\/a> <\/strong>(\u201ccivilized discussion for your community\u201d) and <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/community.nodebb.org\/\">Nodebb<\/a><\/strong> (&#8220;A better community platform for the modern web&#8221;) have less functionality than the others; they&#8217;re basically discussion forums.\u00a0 Discourse&#8217;s functionality and ecosystem of extensions is richer, but it&#8217;s very problematic from a diversity perspective (founder Jeff Atwood also founded Stack Overflow), and most its early adopters have been heavily-male sites (mostly in the tech and gaming areas).\u00a0\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/meta.discourse.org\/\">meta.discourse.org<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/community.nodebb.org\/\">Nodebb&#8217;s community site<\/a> have more.\u00a0 Other forum alternatives include earlier-generation PHP-based solutions like <a href=\"https:\/\/xenforo.com\/community\/forums\/announcements\/\">Xenforo<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/vanillaforums.com\/en\/showcase\/\">Vanilla Forums<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dreamwidth.org\/\">Dreamwidth<\/a><\/strong> has discussion groups (called communities) and journals.\u00a0 It still looks like Live Journal from the early 2000s, which might well be a barrier for a lot of people.\u00a0 Still, it stands out for its attention to accessibility, moderation support, ability to handle threads with thousands of posts, strong ethical principles and focus on privacy, pseudonymity, and accessibility. Dreamwidth founder Denise Paolucci\u2019s<a class=\"markup--anchor markup--li-anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/dw-news.dreamwidth.org\/38065.html?view=5532081&amp;posted=1#cmt5532081\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" data-href=\"http:\/\/dw-news.dreamwidth.org\/38065.html?view=5532081&amp;posted=1#cmt5532081\"> News (and Welcome!),<\/a> from 2017, talks about their history.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/withknown.com\/\"><strong>Known<\/strong><\/a> (&#8220;a collaborative social publishing engine&#8221;) has posts, photos, and discussions. One of its strengths is the ability to syndicate posts to various other social networks, and it has a lot of plugins available.<\/p>\n<p><strong>WordPress<\/strong> and <strong>Drupal<\/strong> are general-purpose open-source platforms which offer plugins to provide feeds, discussion groups, events, and all the other functionality an activism group would need.\u00a0 Both platforms are extremely extensible and customizable, and have a good ecosystem of hosting companies as well.\u00a0 Then again, integrating all the different pieces can be difficult and expensive; and the end result is likely to look a lot less polished than the platforms I discuss above, and there may well be some usability challenges.\u00a0\u00a0 What would be really great is if somebody (or an organization) invested the time to create an integrated easily-installable and very usable distribution, with everything integrated and customizable &#8230; if anybody is working on that please let me know.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>If anybody who has experience with these has any perspectives, I&#8217;d love to hear from you.\u00a0\u00a0 And I&#8217;m sure there are some other good options I missed.\u00a0 Your suggestions welcome on that front as well!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>DRAFT!\u00a0 Feedback welcome! Please do not share broadly yet! A couple of years ago, in my Open Source Bridge presentation Grassroots Activism is Hard. Can Open Source Help?, I talked about &#8220;the Facebook dilemma&#8221;.\u00a0 On the one hand, it&#8217;s very easy to set up Facebook groups and events for activism, and that&#8217;s where a lot [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[420],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drafts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}