In continuing to speak with people on the island, the glaring unmet need is for an island-wide event calendar. I also bear witness to a very strong desire to rid ourselves of corporate social media, with multiple people I’ve spoken to already taking steps.

Here’s an exploration of what exists in this realm, and how the off-the-shelf event/calendar ActivityPub enabled open source projects stack up to the island needs.

Friendica is one of the more popular ActivityPub applications. In essence it’s a Facebook.com alternative that prizes itself on also being a bridge to and from other social networks. It would probably be one of the most understandable to onboard people onto because it would be the most recognizable. A negative is that it’s a bit overwhelming because it can do so much stuff.

At this point I believe Gancio powering the calendar would be a good choice as it offers the simplest execution of the biggest need. That said, it’s insufficient in and of itself as a community social media solution.

I think pairing Gancio with another ActivityPub enabled solution would be the trick. That could be a microblogging option like Mastodon or Pleroma, Gancio combined with Friendica or any number of other potential applications in the Fediverse.

There’s also loads of other considerations at play, such as what language the services are written in, what application clients exist, how committed the teams are, etc. Additionally, while the island community uses a LOT of Facebook and Instagram, there’s way fewer people interested in Twitter style microblogging. So all this is a very surface level exploration.

One note, integrations between ActivityPub enabled services either directly on the back end, or just using the power of ActivityPub!

Feature Idea It’s lonely and off putting to sign into things and have to immediately find people. Since people are signing into a community social network, every account ought to be seeded with people to follow, probably organizations. You could also have a few “ambassadors” in the community who would be seeds for people signing on.

editors note It’s taken me the whole post to figure out how to consistently spell calendar. Embarrassing.

If events, announcements, and photos are the main pieces to Orcas.Social’s community society media, then it’s vital to spend some time on the values and principals they will be implemented.

My work history is in part making video games as a cofounder of PopCap Games. Our goals were to make fun games that everyone can enjoy. Our (very) general process was find game mechanics that we found fun and compelling, and then work very hard to make that accessible to everyone.

A lot of that second step came from removing things that made it less fun and less compelling. Easing people into the games, removing things that made the games more complicated, watching people play and learning from what they did, as well as listening to feedback.

There’s aspects to the implementation of community social media that line up 100% with that design approach.

• Create the core functionality to drive events, announcements, and photos
• Make it so that was approachable and usable for everyone in the community

Using social media isn’t a solitary experience, it’s a communal and shared experience. If we just focused on ease of use and feature implementation, we would miss a huge aspect of social media’s ills around safety and comfort.

Fediverse applications are no different. A lot of black people report experiencing micro and macro aggression within Mastodon communities. Requested tools that can increase safety for women and gender non-binary individuals don’t make it into Mastodon, even ones that are designed and coded and merely need to be pulled into the project.

So when we talk about “how” we will do this, we need to include women, black, native, LGBTQ+ voices, those differently abled, really anyone that’s currently marginalized by society as a whole, and get their input and design on a fundamental level.

As a white, cis-gendered guy, especially one who is currently wealthy, I don’t have the same threats to my emotional, physical, and material safety. I could look at a community social media implementation and would have huge misses.

This inclusion doesn’t happen from a few conversations, but true intersectional inclusion in the process from start to finish. This will change what tools we use, who works on it, how we approach design, and it will change whole swathes of features. Without intersectional inclusion we are just repeating the problems of technology and creating another top-down piece of technology that serves the current social order while it increases violence and alienation.

This is the start of an overview of how community social media could be set up. This isn’t implying that everything is the right answer, a lot of that will happen via design and implementation, but can be used as the start of a high level overview.

I believe the best implementation of community social media is in discreet and definable communities, with lots of overlapping relationships, and I am on Orcas Island (population 7k), I’m using Orcas.Social as the placeholder URL. It’s clear, clean, and easy to remember. As time goes on different branding / defined community may make more sense.

The Homepage

The homepage will be the first interaction most people will have, so it’s key that it bears in mind execution risks for adoption. This means it’s key that it delivers value from the very beginning.

The homepage goals are:

1. Provide immediate value without requiring account to community members, organizations, businesses and tourists.
2. Provide increased value to those logged in with an account
3. Lead in to onboard people into creating an account

We have a good sense for the needs from the early community conversations. This informs the content on the homepage.

It’s also worth noting that this content will be filtered and curated to maximize value and minimize noise. There will also be some quick filter links to quickly get to needed information, like school, kid-friendly, 21+ and over, free and open to the public, etc.

Events: These are pulled from (and link back to) a community calendar.

Announcements: A feed of important announcements or information. You could envision information about power outtages, unusual openings or closings, etc.

Photos: We want to set the stage for Orcas.Social to be a place to experience awe, beauty and friendliness this island has to offer.

Account: We do want to make sure people see that they can log in for a more customized experience. The account creation on boarding will be so vital, and so recognizing that the homepage will be a key part of the first step.

Imagine going to Orcas.Social to see what you could do with the kids on Saturday. Because it collects events from a lot of sources, you able to easily see that roller skating was cancelled, but see that there’s an all ages concert at OddFellows and a screening of the latest animated movie. Two of your favorite restaurants are closed but you see there’s a food truck popup at Con’s. You and your family decide to check out the concert, grab some food at the pop-up, and then decide whether to go back to the all-ages concert or watch the movie!

In talking with people in the Orcas community about their online needs over the past week, there’s a few general trends that come up.

Facebook is the #1 corporate social media network in use here, followed by Instagram. I’ve even see people add each other on Instagram in lieu of exchanging numbers.

While many have a desire to be away from Facebook and corporate social media few see any solutions or potential paths to get out. Almost everyone says that social media is hurting our community. Many people only have accounts because they’re required to be connected to the community.

The main uses on the island corporate social media are buy sell trade, getting updates and news about businesses, events, and groups.

There’s also a huge unmet need on the island for some kind of island-wide event calendar. There’s loads of calendars and information about events in hundreds of different places, some of which are out of date, most of which don’t easily come up in search.

There’s also non-profit, business and local government use of corporate social media which I’ll tackle in another post.

People’s biggest worries about getting off corporate social media are mainly around “having and managing yet another thing.” Diving deeper, some say the hurdle is learning a new thing, others complain about multiple accounts, and many indicate just having to keep another app in their minds feels like a lot.

When pressed, nearly everyone I speak to would be willing to try something new if they really felt it could offer an alternative from corporate social media, assuming enough other people were using it to bring value.

Note: A gap in my exploration so far is that I haven’t sat down with under-threat individuals within the LGBTQ+, people of color or immigrant communities to speak about their specific social media experiences. It’s also worth noting that understanding what types of local issues or harassment may occur online locally for women is also important. Having these conversations explicitly, including the inclusion of people from these groups in any kind of steering committee, would be vital before any serious tool selection or product design began.

The comment below provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the challenges around execution of community social media, namely individuals and community’s resistance to such a change.

[@johnnydegrowth](https://micro.blog/johnnydegrowth) I am more than a little in favor of community media, which is why I'd like to briefly describe what I feel is missing from the Key Steps

Resistance: (1) Active, there may be some from established interests, but it is the least important, (2) Passive, there may be a tendency by some to turn-off immediately when any discussion of new media or new networks comes up, and (3) Invisible, which is the switching cost of changing from the familiar and locked-in to something new and uncertain.

Active Resistance This is represented by those people who are so attached to the current corporate platforms that they actively work to thwart the implementation of community social media. The two main types of people I could see doing this behavior would be those with large following on corporate social media and those with moderation power within communities. In both cases it stems from fear, and since the power of community social media is that it’s within a small community, based approached directly with the people in question. That doesn’t mean you’ll convince everyone, but a walk and conversation can carry huge weight.

Passive Resistance where people are either turned off by something new, or so against social media in general that they work against adoption. In both of these cases I believe that education (here’s how corporate social media hurts our community) combined with critical mass of adoption. Most people don’t have time, desire, or energy for “yet-another-social-media”. If you recall most people left Friendster for MySpace, and then MySpace for FB. In both cases it took other people’s adoption to get them over the curve.

Invisible Resistance will come from it just being hard to do new things. Facebook, at this point, is comfortable. Not everyone likes the Microblogging format of Twitter/X/Bluesky. I’ve been trying to get more people using Signal and some people really don’t want to download a new communications application, and that will only be amplified by social media.

It’s worth framing the areas of resistance by looking at the technology adoption curve. I believe that passive and invisible resistance aren’t based on inherent personas, but more of where people will fall on the adoption curve.

There’s a cadre of people on the island who are already exploring non-corporate social media like Mastodon and Pixelfed. Those people will provide the initial adoption, testing, feedback, etc. They already see the need for this to succeed and are motivated to work through challenges. They are the innovators on the curve and will in essence help design the minimum viable experience.

Key to the strategy are having the next cohort, the early adopters, be ones who are capable and committed to seeding content. These are people that will want to know it’s stable and working. They’re fine if it’s a bit clunky to get on, as long as they can see how their core individual or organizational needs are met, they’ll give it a go. I don’t believe the early adopters will involve some magical adoption, but instead stem from highlighting the need, showing the solution, and making the ask to give it a go to see the content.

Where you’ll start to see more of the resistance will be in the later cohorts, but I believe it goes down dramatically if you’re in front of people at the right time, with the right offering, for what type of adopter they are.

A good way to think about the technology adoption curve is a series of gates. Don’t try to jump ahead to mass adoption if you don’t have the fundamentals down, and you’ll know you have the fundamentals down when the previous cohort is actively using and receiving value from it.

Don’t try to get the anti-technology person who is begrungingly on social media to be an early adopter, make sure the whole value chain is there and their core experience on corporate media is replaceable before making the ask. Don’t put up posters around town with QR codes pointing them to the sign up when it’s barely off the ground.

Being mindful of where people are at and meeting them there will be vital.