Eastleigh Neighbours Facebook to Discourse?

Discuss anything Eastleigh Borough here. Your topic can be tagged with the relevant locations - Central Eastleigh, Bishopstoke, Fair Oak, Horton Heath, Hedge End, West End, Chandlers Ford, etc.

Our facebook group has grown so much, and with that has come problems:

  • Facebook algorithms decide what you see, so you don’t see all posts, and sometimes you see too much of what you don’t want to see.
  • Far too many overlapping and clashing groups - so frequent ‘spamming of groups’ to get a message out there.
  • Easy to negatively interact with posts, and facebook will reward you by showing more posts from that person or type. (The opposite of what you want!)
  • Hard to see ‘all posts’ that you’re interested in.
  • Posts are locked inside the facebook group and not easy to find elsewhere (google).
  • Searching for stuff is hard.
  • Hard to catch up on what you missed.
  • Waiting for features which would help us better manage local information is all dependent on facebook (slow). We’ve been waiting for the ‘topics’ feature to come to our group for a year now.
  • Hard to take a break from facebook without losing contact with your neighbours.

We understand not all users will want to move over and use it. But it’s hopefully a positive home away from facebook, where we can join up and talk to our fellow neighbours in the Borough who don’t want to use facebook. A place where hopefully information can be more easily found.

This forum should hopefully encourage healthier debates, and allow us to categorise posts so people can ignore what they don’t want to see, and see more of they specifically want to see.

Other benefits:

  • Better privacy - not connected to your facebook world.
  • Fancy time off facebook? you can still debate with your neighbours or advertise your business.
  • Rewards and more power to help look after the community for regular contributors. Read more here Understanding Discourse Trust Levels | Blog
  • Categorised discussions - don’t want to see lost cat posts? We can create a category for that.
  • More features - the list is fairly extensive, but for example if someone comments on a post and its actually a new topic, we can move that comment to become a new topic by itself.
  • Keep up to date - Much easier to keep up to date on the things that are interesting to you!

Facebook’s goal is keep you addicted, and keep you interacting - the focus here is useful debate and knowledge share.

It may take some getting used to, but I feel sure it will be worth it.

On board and want to give it a go? Pop on over to the Off Topic Discussions category and make some test posts and have a play. https://eastleigh.online/c/off-topic-discussions

If you have feedback and want to discuss options - talk to us in the https://eastleigh.online/c/site-feedback category. :slight_smile:

Mainly - have fun!

2 Likes

A post was split to a new topic: Sounds good to me! I hope it works out