Goodbye Facebook?
The September 2020 AYWMC start group will be the last to have a dedicated Facebook group. From November onwards all the new start groups will be hosted on the A Year With My Camera app. The local meetup groups and the kit support groups will stay as they are - they are not leaving Facebook.
Too big to manage
The start-group Facebook groups have become a victim of their own success. The first AYWMC FB group back in 2016 had a few hundred members over the whole year. The latest groups have had more than 2,000 each – more than 12,000 members every year.
The large groups mean we need to have rigorously enforced (and sometimes unpopular) posting guidelines to make sure that members’ newsfeeds don’t become overwhelmed with AYWMC posts. We have lost the ability to encourage general questions and provide a place for members simply to chat about photography.
Emma set up the AYWMC app back in April 2019 to see if it could become a viable alternative to Facebook groups and to try and do away with the many rules needed on Facebook. It has been a runaway success with more than 5,000 active members right now. We are able to have dedicated groups for each start date, special interest groups for any number of photography topics, a general discussion section to keep the chat separate and we can quickly adapt to new ideas. One very popular group has been the social distancing/self-isolating group that was set up right at the start of lockdown to give people stuck at home a place to chat and stay in touch.
The app and the Facebook groups have been running alongside each other for 18 months, but there hasn’t been an incentive to make the switch to the app completely until the world came together this year to condemn Facebook for its inaction on hate speech.
Stop Hate For Profit
In June, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, a group of the worlds biggest companies (including Adidas, Unilver and VW) announced they were pausing advertising on Facebook during July 2020: the Stop Hate For Profit boycott was announced. This was to protest the fact that Facebook does not delete racist posts and has an extremely hands-off approach to moderating hate speech on its platform.
Many smaller companies (including A Year With My Camera) joined in. (It’s worth asking the places you spend your money whether they joined in as well.)
Although the boycott was initially just for July many of us have decided to carry on withholding our advertising spend until Facebook takes action (to date it has not: read the outcome of the meeting Stop Hate For Profit had with Mark Zuckerberg here).
Moving to the app
The boycott together with growing size of the groups created a perfect storm and Emma realised it was time to host the AYWMC online community only on the app. If you are starting AYWMC in September 2020 you won’t notice any change but if you join any group from November 2020 onwards this is what will happen:
The email course will always be free. Anyone can sign up for no charge and get the entire year’s workshop straight into their inbox every Thursday.
The A Year With My Camera community from November onwards will only be on the AYWMC app. This has a yearly subscription fee (currently £4.99 a year). There are no third party ads and nobody is tracking your movements around the internet. It’s just a bunch of AYWMC members chatting about photography and sharing photographs.
Local meetup groups
AYWMC volunteers run the local meetup groups on Facebook and they are thriving. Nothing will change with these groups. New AYWMC members will be able to join them after the 4th week of the course, the same as currently.
Future plans for the app
The desktop version is coming very soon: you will be able to access the app from your laptop or computer not just your phone.
Hilary and Judith will switch their admin/help role from the Facebook groups to the app, starting in November.
We want to be ready for when life goes as back to normal as it can, and will be making it possible for members to organise local meetups via the app.
The community on the app will continue to be the most supportive, non-competitive photography group online.
Get the free lessons
Sign up here to get Emma Davies’ A Year With My Camera email lessons straight to your inbox. Join now and get started today:
