The Rise and Fall of Facebook Events

In the early days of Facebook, the Events feature was the bedrock of a lot of community organising. It was free, all your friends were on it, and it worked well. Events you were organising showed up right in the stream of pokes, icanhazcheezburger and failblog memes, and commenting on your friends' "it's complicated" relationship updates.

Fast forward a decade and it barely works. Facebook's insistence on video content, the effective closure of their APIs for community groups, and increasingly exploitative business model means it's harder than ever to get small community group's events in front of people's eyeballs without paying Facebook a hefty sum for the privilege. As a result we are seeing a mass exodus from the platform and feel like the impact of this for community organising is not fully felt yet.

In this podcast, Kim talks to two highly experienced event organisers: David Hayward, founder of Feral Vector festival, and Rachele Evaroa from The Old Abbey Taphouse in Hulme who was recently voted Manchester's most eccentric landlady. We discuss what the future could look like and our plans for our own PlaceCal platform.

Full information and transcript for this episode: https://gfsc.studio/podcast/2