Facebook / Instagram → What Village Replaces

What you probably use Facebook for

Most people use Facebook and Instagram for a mix of things: keeping up with family and friends, organising community groups, sharing photos and stories, following news and public figures, scrolling for entertainment, and buying and selling on Marketplace. These are very different activities, and no single tool replaces all of them. The question is: which of these matter most to you?

What Village does really well

Village is built for real communities — groups where people know each other. It does several things better than Facebook:

Community stories and galleries — share updates, photos, and milestones with people who actually care, not an algorithm
Encrypted group messaging — coordination threads for events, projects, and daily life. Matrix-based, end-to-end encrypted
Community governance — your members write a constitution defining what is acceptable, vote on decisions through polls, and elect moderators who resolve disputes. When something controversial is posted, your community's own moderators decide — not an algorithm trained on US cultural norms. A sports club can enforce 'no politics in match threads'. A church group can require respectful dialogue. A whānau network can protect cultural content. The rules belong to the people they affect.
Calendar and event coordination — community events, RSVPs, shared scheduling
Document sharing and collaboration — community files, meeting notes, shared resources
Member directory and profiles — know who is in your community, their roles, how to reach them

If you run a sports club, church group, neighbourhood association, school parents' group, or whānau network — Village does what your Facebook Group does, but privately, with encryption, and without advertising.

The 200-person community model

Each Village is capped at approximately 200 members. This is intentional, based on Dunbar's number — the cognitive limit on the number of people with whom you can maintain stable social relationships. Research consistently shows that communities above this size lose personal connection and require increasingly complex governance.

Facebook Groups scale to millions — and that is exactly why they are hard to manage, full of spam, and governed by algorithmic content moderation that nobody chose. Village takes the opposite approach: small enough that every member is known, large enough to be a real community.

How federation works

Villages can federate with other Villages — sharing events, stories, or resources across communities while each Village governs itself independently. Think of it like neighbouring towns: each has its own council and rules, but they cooperate on shared interests.

A sports club Village might federate with a regional athletics association Village to share event calendars. A whānau Village might federate with a marae Village for shared cultural events. Each Village controls what it shares and with whom. No central authority decides what flows between communities.

Federation means you can be part of a small, trusted community while staying connected to a wider network — without giving up control to a platform.

What Village does not replace

Being direct about the limitations:

Public broadcasting — Village has no equivalent of posting to hundreds of followers. It is not designed for audiences.
Influencer and creator content — no algorithmic feed, no reels, no stories for public consumption
Marketplace — no buy/sell functionality. Use Trade Me, eBay, or local classifieds.
Event discovery — Village shows events from your community, not events across a city. For discovering new events, other tools are better.
The social graph — Facebook's 3 billion users mean almost everyone is there. Village cannot replicate that network effect and does not try to.

If you use Facebook primarily for scrolling a news feed, following public figures, or discovering events — Village is not the right replacement. Consider reducing Facebook usage rather than replacing it.

Making the choice

The honest question: what do you actually use Facebook for? If the answer is "organising my community, sharing with family, coordinating events" — Village does all of that better, privately, with your community governing itself.

If the answer includes "following news, scrolling for entertainment, marketplace" — keep Facebook for those specific uses, but move your community coordination to Village. You do not have to choose one or the other. Use each tool for what it does well.