Several of my once-Facebook groups have moved to Discord. The Discord business model seems relatively aligned to user-friendly in a free-to-start way that mostly scales with community interest (individuals self-selecting to Nitro; Nitro boots into a community), for the most part, today.

(There are doubts the current model survives the next step in investment rounds, an IPO, but we'll see.)

Everyone older moved from Facebook to WhatsApp years ago. The youngsters went to Insta instead.

Most groups here in Argentina run on WhatsApp. You get like a hundred messages per day. Luckily someone pins the important messages, she deserves a medal.

Racket is using https://www.discourse.org/contact , but I'm not sure how civilian friendly it is.

We actually have an old fashioned email list. It's a Google Group, because Yahoo Groups shut down.

At this point, I'm so tempted to just write some mobile-first forum software or make an alt-reddit. Communities have so much value, but they barely exist anymore.

I have a NextDoor account, which is made for the neighbor stuff. That said, I don’t manage a community on it and haven’t actually logged into it in over a year, so I can’t really speak to its quality. I did have to spend a lot of time turning off notifications, it is very noisy by default.

There's lots of web-forum software out there... I like the FB group UX, but it's definitely gotten worse over time. I think the problem is network affect and notifications in general.

I've gotten to where I disable notifications on almost everything to the point I usually don't even see a lot of messages until I check myself.

I'm more inclined to write my own, but that feels like such a hit or miss proposal at this point.

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