The question is somewhat rhetorical, but I’ve been mulling about this recently. In our current Facebook group, we have guidelines about when to create a new post. For example, “one post per cat per day max”, except for questions on very different topics. We arrived to this because some people were posting in stream-of-consciousness “chat” (no pun intended) mode and we’d end up with 5 3-liner posts in the space of a few hours. At this stage the guidelines work quite well for us on Facebook.
Technical Differences
Here are some obvious differences between Discourse topics and Facebook posts.
Titles
Topics in Discourse have titles, Facebook posts don’t (most of the time; every now and again they try to introduce them, then they disappear). For comparison, what composing a post in Facebook versus a topic in Discourse looks like.
“Activation” interface
The interface is differently inviting, both for creating a new post/topic or responding. Facebook typically displays a post/comment/answer field that one just clicks on to shift the focus to. This reduces friction as the user’s action doesn’t really seem to “do” anything to the interface except allow them to type, and the “input area” is visible at all times – contrast with a “reply” or “post” button that actively generates a composing area.
Here’s what viewing the group on Facebook looks like, with the “create post” area already visible:
Viewing a category in Discourse, with the “create topic” button:
Same comparison for responding/commenting (Facebook with short post/no comments, or longer post with preexisting comments):
The “comment button” just under the post simply moves the focus to the commenting input area, just like clicking in the area to type does.
In Discourse, you click on the reply button on the first post of the topic or at the bottom of the topic to respond:
Both on Facebook and Discourse, you can respond to a specific comment/post in the thread.
Formatting
Discourse offers much richer formatting options than Facebook, whether one is writing a new topic or responding. In that respect it feels much more like a blog post editor or “Word document”. Facebook provides some post formatting options (titles, bold, italic, quotes) but only in the desktop browser (not on mobile, not for comments). It’s often buggy, btw 
.
Facebook doesn’t allow real hyperlinks, just pasting naked URLs, which doesn’t always work. It automatically “expands” one of the links (can be selected by user) into a lightbox-type preview for the publication.
Response threading
On Facebook, comment threading/nesting is two levels deep and cannot be turned off. All comments are not always visible. Their order sometimes seems random. On Discourse, threaded replies can be turned off, all posts (= replies/comments) in a topic are visible in their entirety (truncated on Facebook), in chronological order, whilst still making visible what is a response to what.
The Discourse “quote” functionality allows one to specify clearly what one is responding to, something that can only imperfectly be done on Facebook through replying to a specific comment: the response will be displayed in a sub-thread if it’s not too deeply nested.
What does this mean for how people will use Discourse topics vs Facebook posts?
Though Facebook group posts and Discourse topics may seem equivalent on the surface, there are actually sufficient differences on how they are implemented that one may question whether they will be used in the same way by community members migrating from Facebook to Discourse.
(There is another issue here regarding migration, that I’ll leave aside: people who are used to seeing an input-like area to post or respond generally feel confused when arriving on Discourse and can’t figure out how to post or comment, because the “signposts” they are used to seeing for that look very different.)
My initial intuition was to say that anything done on Facebook with a post will be done on Discourse with a topic. (Which, by the way, makes me want to rename topics “posts” and posts “comments” – though in French it’s be “publication” and “commentaire”, generally expressed in the shorthand “publi” and “comm”.) But now I’m not so sure.
Should we rethink how we organise member contributions? I know that on the German-speaking forum on the same topic as ours, they have “one topic per cat”, period, that just goes on for ever and ever. It feels like this way of doing things breaks the “community support” dynamic and shifts it towards a more member-centred way of doing things: “ah, here are my handful of helpers”.
We do have types of content in our community that might more adequately be described as “topics”: our documents and videos. For example, there is one on syringes; one on glucose monitors; one on managing insulin injections with irregular work hours; one on managing absences; one on food, another on medical training, on using urine testing strips, etc. Some of these are also issues that come up again and again, and for me they are definitely “topics”, which can be accompanied by a clarifying discussion.
But beyond that, the way people function, I think we’ll agree (particularly in a high-stress context – people are arriving with beloved pets on death’s door), is they have a need, a question, a problem, and they just want to dump it down in writing somewhere to get an answer.
That’s one of the reasons that on the Facebook group, we regularly have instances of unwitting “comment thread hijacking”, because for our member base (not very digitally literate), when they are reading posts in the group, the “Write something…” invitation that Facebook sticks at the top of the page is not visible anymore, but they do see invitations to comment just about everywhere. So they use the closest available input area to write something.
The way Discourse is set up, this might be less of a problem (and the moderation team can correct it by moving the offending post to a new topic) – although I still think we’ll see some of it as the “new topic” button isn’t visible when viewing a topic (maybe there’s a way to make that happen, haven’t looked yet). So people reading a topic and who then feel inspired to ask their own question might not know where to go for that, and respond instead.
So I’m wondering if instead of fighting this, we should “go with it”. I’m of course particularly thinking of new users here. Maybe a weekly topic for new arrivals, where people can just jump in and respond and introduce themselves and ask questions, and we can tend to their immediate needs until they are more comfortable navigating in the community and using Discourse? Or do we try and shepherd all questions around a specific issue into one topic (e.g. irregular work hours) – but in that case, I’m concerned it’ll grow into a monster thread with the years.
If you have a support community with stressed-out members and rather low digital literacy, how do you organise your community life regarding topics and posts? Or even if it isn’t the case, do you have any thoughts on this – particularly if you’re familiar with both Discourse and Facebook?
Note: I know that this is once again going to come across as me trying to “think out” everything in advance. As I explained elsewhere, I’m all for setting things up in an iterative way, observing people’s behaviour and adapting when needed. In this context however, if I just open the gates and let a swarm of facebook users into Discourse it’s either going to be chaos, with posts and topics all over the place, or crickets because they’re too lost and confused to do anything.