I see the same with homeschool groups where I live. I grew up homeschooled. We had a very large homeschool group get together at our church once a week and did outings together on occasion. We even had a group that would go on vacations together! No Internet at all...All it takes is one or two people willing to coordinate it all, no Internet needed at all. Technology kills human interaction sadly. My suggestion would to just be the coordinator over forcing others to adopt a new platform. It will require more work though.
We're homeschooling. We want to socialize our child by connecting with other local homeschoolers.
- There are literally zero local groups who maintain a current website of any kind.
- They use Facebook groups exclusively.
- They use GroupMe chats to organize and discuss goings-on.
- All signups for co-op classes or activities are done with Google Forms.
- All documents that are shared are through Google Docs.
- Photos from activities are shared on Facebook.
- Nobody involved knows that any of this is a problem.
I am completely lost on how to regularly participate without undoing all my hard work. Right now my plan is to duplicate their privacy-violating services with FOSS and self-hosted options, then try to find a few who will consider using those instead. They're tolerating me currently, but one is already obviously frustrated that I can't just be found and added to groups with the app.
I was blindsided by the ignorance of the homeschool community. There's very little thought present of freedom or sovereignty, in privacy or money. Everything is permissioned, centralized, and doxxed.
I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. We'll keep on keeping on, but it would be nice to have some switched-on locals to supplement the good Nostr crowd.
nostr:nprofile1qqsrkl7gyds37xh2af37uwlknvjm32ska3hgr5d0cwgzdqy0ux2r2ncpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuvrcvd5xzapwvdhk6yscnpy Curious to hear your thoughts or suggestions on this, also.
Discussion
I agree. I'd like to see if maybe a couple will add in some more private or FOSS options just to try. I definitely have no delusions of switching anyone completely. It'd be nice to coordinate with a few people directly instead of blasting it on some big tech platform.