Why is fCC using facebook for local groups?

Why is sub-categories for every country/city impractical if they’re created and maintained by the members who want them, the way FB groups are created and maintained now?

It is probably impractical for our forum. Our forum is not made to connect people together but for the wiki, and for people to get help. We recently shrunk the size of our forum considerably to make it smaller, and having a sub-category for every city/country is not only beyond the scope of these forums, it would make our forums sooo much larger, and it would make it harder for contributors. I don’t really think a section for each country/city on our forum is practical, and I think others would agree with me. If you would like to know more, and possibly see others ways or things you can do, I suggest you message the FCC founder @QuincyLarson.

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Thanks Isaac, I will message Quincy. Just to be clear, I’m imagining a Local Groups top category (alongside News, Wiki etc.) with city/country sub-categories.

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The reason for closed groups tend to be that it’s easy for the clickbait bots to join open groups making if difficult for management of the pages to enforce spam posts.
I run a couple pages in NY with over 5k followers each and by making the groups closed, you can choose who is capable of joining which displays when they joined Facebook.
If the request is coming from someone who joined Facebook 2 hours and has hundreds of friends, chances are they’re a bot who will end up posting clickbait.

It was pretty clear to me at first glance that these steps are optional.

Now that you mention it, I’ve never really thought much about what a star on GitHub means. I’ve sort of naively used it more like “this is interesting to me and/or I am using it.” Looked at that way I guess it’d be alright to star FCC (I suppose I did, also in appreciation of getting something I really wanted to do for free ). But if in fact it’s suppose to mean “this is top notch work, very exciting,” then I agree with you.

Maybe this meaning would have been worth talking about in the challenge itself–sort of a culture of coding lesson.

Given the recent revelations about FarceBook, giving them any sort of endorsement in the FCC process is not only damaging to the credibility of FCC, it’s the ethical equivalent of encouraging people to swim in a shark tank.

These are all proprietary platforms, which require people to run proprietary JS on their own computers to use them. Fully free code, federated replacements for all of them are ready to use:

  • FaceBook: The Federation (Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, SocialHome)
  • Slack: Matrix (like a federated, web-native IRC, plus native support for voice and video)
  • MeetUp: GetTogether (fairly new project but basic functions are in place, and they plan to federate using ActivityPub

While we’re on the subject, the same is true of GitHub, and all the same features are offered by GitLab, but without the proprietary JS.

If FCC, the people mentoring free code developers, don’t use free code software where it exists, why should anyone?

BTW As I’m new here, Discourse wouldn’t let me provide more than one link (sensible but frustrating), so I’ve put up a linked version of this comment on my own wiki.

EDIT: So I just got up to Exercise #17 and it’s encouraging me to use Google fonts, despite the fact that this creates a totally avoidable dependence on a third-party site owned by a country well know for user surveillance. It even says on that very page that it will break your site for people in countries that block Google. I also see that the FCC site has prominent links to Medium and YouTube, two other proprietary walled gardens. I look forward to helping the FCC community choose user-respecting replacements for all these platforms, and change the exercises to stop promoting them.