How do you beat the defeated feeling?

Think about the motivation behind your intentions. Did you want to create a more open alternative to Facebook Or did you want to create a specialised community catering for specific niche?

WeMe and thousands of other sites trying to stick up to Facebook for the most part just build the next big player in social networking industry. As soon as bill start rolling in they will have to make compromises. Then, when editorials pressures, complains, police/court orders and civil suits come, they will have to start limiting freedoms. They will have to do this in a scalable fashion, which means sweeping decisions that hurt some good members. These challenges are exactly the same as Facebook facing, and trust me - Facebook didn’t close groups because they didn’t like them - they closed them because it was not worth the trouble of managing them. WeMe and the likes will have the same problem, but without massive bank accounts. how to solve that? Put ads and Sell data (which works for FB only because they have massive private deals and ad targeting AI) or charge for membership (in the world where ppl are used to free social networking apps, all readily available). This Is why we don’t recommend starting generic social networks, but always choose a specific niche.

Now, if you are building a site, specifically and only for chickens sales, say. You structure it in the best way suitable for this particular industry, including helpful information, member entitlements, member vesting procedures, etc. Your site would then become an authority source/platform for this particular subject - in people’s minds there’d be FB/WeMe/etc-groups for chicken sakes and the _your site_ as go destinations for anything that has to do with chickens. Then, if you want to step it up, you may be able to offer sub communities environment for current FB/WeMe groups operators with clearly better control and opportunity for reaching to their group members, perhaps revenue sharing, etc. 

Mind you, that advertising your site on matching FB groups, while seemingly Obvious, is not an effective marketing move - FB is well aware of potential dangers of leaking members to external communities and their feeds are tuned to minimise impact - you will be paying for “results“ such as likes and views, but will never see actual visitors, let alone members. We tried it many times, and ultimately successfully proved wrongdoing to FB and received refunds on all advertisevent expenses. 

If you are group admin on FB or hope to promote through organic (not boosted) posts, your chances are even worse - FB suppresses exposure of unboosted group posts in members groups. You’d be lucky if 10% of your group members will see the group post in their feeds (and they rarely go to the group itself to checkout what’s new - they just roll the feed0, even lower than that if the post contains links to external resources, and even worse if those resources are identified as “undesirable” (ever noticed how sharing YouTube video on FB creates a tiny embed and gets no likes, while same video directly uploaded and shared gets all the love?).

if you have to advertise on FB, do it through organic marketing - create FB-native posts and videos, that are interesting/controversial , and mention your brand without direct links, and you may well get much better outcome.

Also don’t worry about WeMe - these sites have been popping up by dozens every year, and if at some point we get a generic social network that is popular AND ethical, it should mean good news for all small/individual/niche sites and communities because it would give fair go at promoting those tailored experiences on the generic forum. Think about them as of infrastructure needed to reach out to people - much like internet providers, search engines and hosting companies. 

Nobody can stop you from creating the best place for people that are passionate about something you know, understand and want to support..