Man, i am with you, fuck fucking Facebook. It really shits me how the marketing for so many grassroots events now only exist on that platform, or other platforms owned by the same goddamn company like Instagram. People suggest just to create a burner account solely for the purpose of looking up information that only exists on these platforms, but imo that's just letting the bastards win. On the other hand, maybe this isn't the hill to die on?
Anyway, on your point, here are some sites that still do updates outside of the American social media space.
- goabase ॐ parties and people - https://www.goabase.net/ Goabase still exists, and it is a huge blast from the past website with a guestbook and everything, they still feature psytrance and hippie-ish parties from all over the world, with strong lean to Germany
- https://ra.co/events Resident Advisor's niche is Brooklyn hipster techno club nights, but some festivals pop up there too, you gotta dig deep to find the less commercial events
- Bassliner - https://bassliner.org/en Bassliner is a bus service that transports people in Germany to several summer festivals, but their email newsletter is good starting point to find out what's going on, these are big money festivals tho, if you want a free ticket best way is to volunteer to work on the crew
These are obviously slanted toward places i lived and music i am more interested in.
There are several specific festivals that maintain mailing lists that occasionally mention other stuff going on. E.g. Harvest Festival
Harvest festival - https://harvestfestival.org/, those dudes also do some other events in Toronto/Ontario area like a canoe trip, or spontaneous cherry blossom fest. But even the promoters who still send out occasional email blasts to their oldskool punters mostly use social media nowadays.
Like, some guys i remember who used to lean on connections at the local university to host websites or send out invites, get donations from people actually in the scene to fund a small dedicated server, they all use big tech now, even we're all grown up these days and could comfortably pay for self-hosting. If you talk to them, they say they can't get the numbers if they try to contact people old way. Even paper flyers don't work because there's no record stores any more.
One of my friends put together a small gig of around 50 people a year or two back, full ass hippie style, world music, cacao ceremony, yoga, the whole thing... Only to be found on Facebook.
Another friend put together a more blues roots indigenous rural back yard bash type thing last year... Facebook.
One promoter i used to crew for did a 10 (shit, maybe it was 20 now...) year anniversary gig, old DJs and musicians coming out of the woodwork who hadn't played in forever, fire twirling, projections, camping in the woods, big cauldron of masala chai, just like the good old days... Fucking Facebook.
Man, fuck Facebook.
I keep hoping that the kids have figured out a new way to keep their finger on the pulse and i am just too old and square to get it. But i fear they are mostly using WhatsApp, Discord etc so i guess the megacorps won.
Sorry for rant. I hope people will post more sources here because mine are not enough.
