Hi all. First time posting here, so go easy 
I would like to start or join a camp in my local town, but it seems that these groups are only managed on Facebook. I have many good reasons not to use facebook (which we can go into elsewhere), but I’d still like to participate or create a camp here. What are the ways that people get around that ?
The recommendation is just to create a dummy FCC-only facebook account. There’s no need to attach personal information or connect it to any other platforms.
Or, if you don’t want to touch Facebook at all, it could be as simple as asking someone who’s in the group to let you know about events. They’d have to be reliable, though!
I don’t think there’s any mandate that a local group has to use Facebook; it’s just a convenient way to make announcements. You could use Slack, for instance (though it has its privacy concerns as well).
Thanks for both replies. I personally do not want to touch facebook, and without having facebook, I can’t really see who’s in the group. I was quite surprised though at this link with Facebook, since FCC is using Discourse (here), which is a much better way to manage a community.
Checkout Meetup. It’s a non-Facebook option to create a group. The members can still interact with one another and you can create events that notifies everyone in the group.
Totally off-topc, but I actually got over wanting to use Facebook, so if insisting that local camps are only created as facebook groups means I can only be part of the “global” community, I guess I can live with that 
Just seems a bit wierd to delegate that to Facebook when Discourse handles it well.
The reason I started the topic was that I saw that there is a local group here, and I wanted to join it, go hack with actual people, but in order to do that I’m forced to use facebook, which as I’ve mentioned, I’m done with. So - no loss, I guess… just curious.
Thank you again all for the responses.
Could this be a good use case for Diaspora, or am I just looking too hard for a reason to use Diaspora?
