The discussion explores the pros and cons of using Facebook Groups for communities, highlighting their suitability for small, transactional, or Facebook-centric groups. However, it also points out significant drawbacks, such as limited data ownership, lack of search engine indexing, and exclusion of non-Facebook users. Alternatives like chat platforms (Slack, Discord), newsletters, and dedicated community software (e.g., Discourse) are considered, with emphasis on the importance of mobile experience and notifications. The conversation underscores the challenge of migrating established Facebook Groups to other platforms, particularly due to the network effect and user expectations for seamless mobile engagement. justin initiates the guide, anon73664359 brings up Twitter Communities, asirota stresses mobile engagement and the difficulty of migration, and jimkleiber and merefield discuss mobile notification limitations and the potential for web-based solutions.
For a fledgling community, Facebook Groups are often seen as the leading standard. They’re easy to access, come with a built-in audience, and require little to no knowledge to get started. But are Facebook Groups the only option? When might you need something a bit more powerful?
What about Twitter Communities?
They’re still pretty new, and Twitter has a habit of rolling back new things lately 
I don’t think this is a feature that Twitter will dump. It worked out very well for Facebook, so why not Twitter?
Besides, Twitter has always been a popular place amongst hobbyists. This is something that’ll be much appreciated.
First of all let me congratulate for starting this very important conversation. Facebook Groups continue to be a very powerful way to keep the stickiness of Facebook for people like me who are on the fence of keeping their account active at all. I am a participant on 2-3 Facebook Groups that honestly I don’t think would run outside of Facebook well. One is under 100 members that I run for an alumni club. The other is a 5000+ member group for a piece of software I resell.
It’s the second group that I think would be amazing outside of Facebook Groups, but I fear that the since the average age of that group is closer to 50+ and their technical level is quite low, I do wonder whether there is another factor to consider on moving off Facebook Groups: mobile enagement.
It is the asynchronous nature of these communities with strong mobile app support that keep systems like Facebook, Slack, Twitter stickier than ever. Without a strong mobile experience for a community platform and extraordinarily easy out of the box onboarding, I fear that “yet another place to click” phenomenon may take over. A community that has spent years on Facebook will need to have something extraordinarily better to go to, and if it fails on mobile, I think that community will suffer greatly. The risk is real.
It’s definitely difficult to get a group entrenched in one platform to switch to another – especially without a full migration option. One challenge that might arise on a different platform is realizing just how a community was due to the platform’s network effect vs. the actual value the community provided. Discourse naturally doesn’t have a network effect like that as we don’t have a broad-based network of any kind – just lots of variously sized communities dotting the Internet landscape. And what makes a Discourse community stick is the inherent value its members find in discussing topics together, not just the platform itself.
As far as mobile goes - I’m curious if you see an advantage Facebook has over other platforms (including ours) on mobile?
I agree. I think the level of discourse will be better but honestly some people don’t want to invest the time and effort to up their game.
On mobile it’s simple - one feature rules them all: notifications on likes, responses and new content in a feed. Without that it doesn’t work at all.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I test the new Discourse Chat plugin. The chat in itself makes me much more excited to use Discourse with a group and yet, iOS not allowing progressive web apps (PWAs, or when one clicks “Add to Home Screen” from Safari) to send notifications makes it hard for mobile usage. I mean, for me, I may see it as a blessing, as I often turn off notifications anyway, yet not sure community members would agree.
Apparently PWAs can have notifications on Android, so it seems to be just a waiting game until Apple allows them.
In the meantime, I don’t know what the other options are. DiscourseHub seems to give notifications only for Discourse-hosted sites, and Fig for iOS, which I like, I think has stopped being developed.
This is not correct. It should work for the self-hosted too.
And that’s good because I can’t see Apple closing this gap. It’s an unacceptably dominant pseudo-monopoly. Were they to implement web notifications on iOS that would be yet another reason not to bother with creating a app specifically for their proprietary App Store to then have to suffer revenue sharing and/or the additional build and maintenance costs. Were law makers sophisticated enough they should probably have legislated for this already. Don’t let that stop you contacting your representative: not providing web notifications is highly anti-competitive!