Discouragement of the First-Time Discourse Admin

Community
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I’m posting this as a separate topic from Structuring an active support community migrating from Facebook because it feels on another level: community building starts before anybody is there, when the community builder (let’s call her that) designs the way the community will function and implements that community design in her tool of choice: adjusting settings, adding or removing functionalities, picking a theme, creating categories, thinking about the member onboarding flow, how moderation will be enforced, etc.

These design decisions are the result of an interaction, one could say a “conversation”, between the vision of the community builder and the possibilities of the tool. “We shape our tools and they shape us”, quoting liberally.

Right now, this community builder is feeling very overwhelmed and discouraged. And I’d like to share some thoughts about that.

First, a little about me. I’m not a first-time community builder, or new to web-based tools. I’ve been in this space of “humans connecting online” for over 25 years, at times professionally, at times not. I’m not a developer, but I have enough technical knowledge that I have at times administered my own server and coded a few WordPress plugins, back in the days. I’ve designed and taught courses on blogging, social media and online communities before they were a “thing”. I’m no stranger to hunkering down with the user manual to troubleshoot whatever is not working correctly.

The main community I run nowadays is going to turn eight years old and is 8-9k members strong, over three facebook groups. It is completely non-web, non-technical. It’s for people with sick cats. And veterinarians. It is very active, very healthy, and (I’m not the one who says it) extremely well-managed and moderated. There is a team of 20-30 people involved in running it. The average community member struggles digitally as soon as they are taken out of their usual activities (chatting on Messenger, creating a facebook post, or making a comment). Getting them to fill in values in a Google Sheet, stay logged in there on their phone, and share the link to the Sheet in their posts is a challenge.

This is not to toot my horn, but to state clearly that I am what one could call a non-developer web power-user. Not some random person who is thinking of setting up a “forum” or a “community”.

And although I’m super enthusiastic about the possibilities I see with Discourse, I am drowning. I’ve spent countless hours searching, reading, and posting on Meta. I’ve looked at setting checkboxes until my eyes go square. I am familiar enough with the platform to have a feel for what should be possible, but I feel as if I’m in front of the contents of the boxes my IKEA sofa was delivered in, but without the instructions or the tools. The cognitive load of all the possibilities and options is killing me. The thought of my sweet, digitally-illiterate members being faced with the multitude of functionalities of Discourse’s default settings and appearance gives me cold sweats.

So what am I doing here? Why not leave things as they are, if my Facebook community is going so well? Because I have known from day one that Facebook would work only as long as its inevitable enshittification allowed (wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but I understood the process very clearly). For years, the balance was in Facebook’s favour. These last years, it has started to tip. Every now and again I would keep an eye open for alternatives, knowing that I could wake up one morning with the group gone. But no solution I saw seemed like a viable option to support this community.

This summer, Discourse arrived on my radar. I signed up for a trial and played around with it all I could for a week (my Facebook account suspension ate up the second week of the trial, but that’s another story). I was blown away. Here was a tool that would allow us to do everything we could only dream of on Facebook. It was powerful, endlessly configurable, modern and robust. And open-source: I could self-host it. Within a few days, I was sold. Our community’s new home would be called Discourse.

I haven’t changed my mind. I still see a future where Discourse checks all those boxes for us, and where our community thrives in its own home, free from the shackles of Big Platform. But getting there is a much more difficult road than I anticipated. I am really struggling. Yesterday one of my tech-savvier moderators hopped onto our Discourse install to come and lend me a hand, and her initial reaction was confusion with the interface and functionalities. If I needed confirmation that the default is far, far from what will work for us.

Last night, I stumbled upon this topic: Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"? – I read, read, and read some more. I could relate to a lot of the sentiment expressed in the conversation. @oshyan , in particular, makes many points that really hit home for me. I honestly consider that somebody with my background and skillset should not be having such a hard time getting Discourse into working shape for a community of “normal people”. I’ve installed and configured WordPress installations with umpteen plugins countless times without breaking a sweat – sure, WordPress is less complex, but it’s not just that: there is something about the “information architecture” of finding my way through what I need to do that makes it feel like a maze rather than a guided city tour.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong. But if I am, it is despite my best efforts to “do it right”. I am hugely appreciative of the existence of Discourse. Truly. And the responsiveness I’ve found on Meta is also heart-warming. I understand that when running a business or even “just” developing a tool, ressources are never sufficient to do everything that would need to be done and one wishes to do.

But it’s extremely frustrating, as an enthusiastic user, to feel that the interface of the tool is getting in the way rather than facilitating a crucial part of building and managing a community. And this is something that even the most helpful support community in the world (looking at you, Meta!) can’t “fix”, unfortunately.

As I see it, particularly after reading the long thread linked to above, it’s fine to have a ton of features and settings, to allow the (real) power users to have things their way if they want to. But what I see missing in Discourse is a pared-down out-of-the-box configuration that will work for the average community builder and the average non-techy community. Sometimes less is more.

When you install WordPress, you can start blogging right away as long as you have the technical skills to send an e-mail, and it will work for you, average person who has stuff to say, and your average readers who want to read you. You can tweak a few settings if you like, or go to town with plugins and themes if you’re an edge use-case or a power-user. My Mac has design choices baked in that mostly work for most people. If they don’t, it even has a command line and config files that courageous or technical users can play with.

I’m aware I’m probably not saying anything here that hasn’t been said before, and that “Discourse” is certainly aware of its shortcomings and plans to tackle them. But I’m tired and frustrated, and discouraged, and – not to take anything away of how nice and supportive people are here – I am feeling a bit alone with how difficult this all is: look, there are all these great guides, all this great information on Meta, all these settings and themes and components and plugins to solve my problems one way or another. But that does nothing to help solve the issue that exists at another level: finding my way through this unfamiliar jungle of possibilities so abundant that they refuse to find a stable place in my brain, and dealing with an interface which adds friction (not on purpose of course!) in places where I’d need it removed.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening. And I welcome your thoughts regarding my experience, whether you have been through or are going through similar trials, or think I am missing the point.

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Migrating from Facebook: specific challenges, and some thoughts
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Hello,

First of all, thank you for clearly and thoroughly expressing your situation and frustrations.

I believe it’s important to distinguish between the experience of an administrator and that of a user. In my opinion, users of Discourse don’t struggle with this platform any more than they would with similar ones. However, the experience for administrators is indeed quite different.

Discourse is an extremely powerful platform, but its complexity is undeniable. Personally, I wouldn’t generalize my experience: having used similar platforms over twenty-five years ago, I’m accustomed to this type of tool and its intricacies. That said, even as a highly experienced administrator, I must admit that in recent weeks or months, I’ve felt somewhat overwhelmed by the rapid pace of updates and the conflicts that arise, especially between extensions and plugins.

To summarize my own experience, the main challenges stem from the fast pace of updates and version conflicts between components and plugins. The complexity of Discourse and the occasionally confusing nature of its settings are, in my view, largely due to this rapid development cycle, as well as the fact that the software is open-source—a tremendous advantage, albeit with a few minor drawbacks.

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Eeps, I haven’t even been faced with those yet! :fearful:

I hope you’re right on that – though in my case, the “control” is Facebook, which people already use anyway. It’s the main reason I’ve waited so long to consider migrating away from there…

The way categories and tags are organised are also an important part of the architecture community members will be faced with, so the difficulties for the admin can indirectly impact the users, if they mean that the community “structure” is not as well-designed as it could have been.

Thanks for taking the time to read me and respond!

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It’s true that there is a fundamental difference between Facebook groups and Discourse, for example, in terms of their structure. Discourse is a forum. At least, most people use it as a forum. I also use it a little bit like a blog and a forum, because it’s possible. It all depends on your audience’s past experience. If your audience has no experience with forum structures, it can indeed be a problem when coming from Facebook, and that’s undeniable. If part of your audience already has experience with forums, I’m not just talking about Discourse, but all forums that have a forum structure, i.e., categories or sections. It’s quite different. They’ll be able to find their way around very easily.

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I would recommend not looking at most of them unless you have a specific goal in mind, and then taking it one step at a time (while asking for help here as needed!).

You’re right, there are an enormous amount of possibilities and they could be organized better… and we’re working on it, but it’s a long road. The number of configuration options is currently greater than what any single person can form a mental model of… so it’s no surprise that you’re overwhelmed by possibilities.

We can! every single post here will be read by someone working on Discourse. After reading your posts last week I started working on a feature to add tags directly via the tag page. This is feedback we’ve received a number of times so it seemed about time we try it.

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Sorry you’re frustrated. There are lots of setttings and whatnot.

And that’s true of Discourse. You can just start posting right away. Just like in WordPress, you don’t even need to create a category, just use the default ones. If that’s what you really wanted to do, then they are about the same.

The thing that I think I know you want to do is to have a cat database. That is hard. To do it in wordpress, you’d have to create a new post-type and I don’t know what else to make it so that one of those could belong to multiple users and let those users have multiple cats. I’d charge you $10,000 to do it in WordPress (but that’s just because I hate wordpress); I’d likely do it for $1000-2000 to do it in Discourse. Neither Discourse nor WordPress will do that without someone who has a bunch of skills beyond being able to send an email.

The simple cat database solution is a cat category and a template. If two people love the cat, there will be no formal mechanism for indicating that. Just add in the text @katDude also loves this cat and tell KatDude to watch the topic. Another way would be to contrive to have people create an extra account with the cats name, and then you could @mention that user, but that’s a huge PITA.

But what you really want is a whole new model for the cats, and then instead of @mention you could :cat: Mention them. It’d be really cool, but that’d add to the development costs.

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At this stage, there really is quite a lot that I need to “fix” in how things look or work. I think that one thing that isn’t helping is that as I am not familiar (enough) with Discourse, I often do not know if what I’m trying to achieve is controlled by a setting, or dealt with on theme (or component) level, or a plugin.

It’s good to hear, and really, I understand it is a big endeavour.

This! That’s exactly it. And to be honest, I’m not used to being faced with situations that resist my “mental modelling” which can also explain why I’m not dealing with this situation very well.

Wow, that’s great to hear.

After reading you and the other comments so far, I’m thinking maybe I need to post a bit more plainly about my issues on a “community member experience” level (what I’m trying to achieve) rather than work halfway through it myself and ask more “technical” questions.

I’ll also try and clarify and share (in case it’s helpful) how my mind is wrapping itself around what Discourse does (bits of my “mental model”).

Thanks a lot for stopping by and being attentive to my plight!

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Yes! I think there ARE a few individuals around who have almost all of Discourse in their mind. And they could help you exactly if you ask more general questions.

Have you tried ask.discourse.com? It’s also quite good at this.

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:slightly_smiling_face: thanks for saying that!

I don’t think that’s quite right. The comparison between the two tools has limits, and I think they make a difference here: WordPress, as a blogging tool, is primarily designed for writing blog posts. Discourse, on the other hand, is designed to house a community. Community dynamics are much more complex than the writer-reader relationship of the blog.

Of course I open up my Discourse community to my members with the default settings, but the chances that they will stick around long enough for there to actually be a community there are slim, in all honesty. Whereas I can write blog post after blog post in my vanilla WordPress install, and I’ll have a perfectly fine blog to show people after some time, even if nobody visits it much.

Actually, that’s really not one of my headaches. Having “cat files” in a category is a perfectly workable option (an extension of what we do today with Google Sheets, one per cat).

My headaches are things like:

  • not being able to play around with category structure and properties easily and “see” the result (“thinking out loud” with the tool – the visual interface mockup Canapin spun up would clearly be exactly the kind of thing needed for that)
  • not being able to easily identify what controls certain aspects of the visual layout of topics, category listings, the navigation, the various widgets and buttons that are everywhere
  • badges: there are too many of them, do I do away with them completely, or just some of them, which ones, what will be a good balance between “nudges of encouragement” and what might be perceived as “useless/confusing notifications”?
  • notifications and alerts: in app, by e-mail… again, after less than 24h in a barely hatched Discourse instance, my moderator’s first comment this morning was on the number of e-mails she had in her inbox – I see the e-mail integration/notifications as an asset, but what will be the right balance so people don’t simply flee because they feel spammed?
  • custom user fields not working as I expected: I added a handful of them, thinking I would refine later, but I didn’t manage to find where to fill in those added fields in my current profile, so that’s making me think that “refine later” is maybe a bad calculation (or maybe I didn’t manage to find those custom user fields on my profile, so how will our regular members find them?)
  • member onboarding: on Facebook we do series of posts to “nudge” new members along the “learning journey” to take care of their cat. It’s a huge timesink, very cumbersome to do. I’m certain Discourse can automate that (I’ve already looked a bit). Maybe we do this by message rather than posts? What are the steps I need to take to get a decent “autoresponder-like” thing going on? How easy (or not, cf. categories) will it be to fiddle with the onboarding process once something is in place and people are in the Discourse community?
  • user roles and permissions: on Facebook we have moderators and helpers, and the moderation team is structured in little teams with specific missions. Some triage new users and do welcome posts. Some do content moderation. Some manage the beginners group. Some coach the helpers. Some work on preparing member lists for our periodic onboarding posts. We’ve always felt limited by the very restrictive user roles on Facebook, and Discourse is going to allow us to do things differently. But how? Again, there is “design” (which roles and groups and permissions and who goes where) and “implementation in the system” (actually fiddling with groups, settings, member lists…). And how will our current organisation function or clash with built-in trust levels? Do the progression criteria make any kind of sense for our community?
  • group documents: seems they will work as Published Pages, but I need to figure out how to style the title levels properly to match the existing documents somewhat. How do I manage the import/migration? Copy-paste by hand, or is there a way to automate this? I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know, in a way. Same with videos: I need to stick the 70 or so videos in Youtube, and then create topics for each of them: is it worth looking for an automated solution or do we do it by hand? No idea.
  • …
  • this kind of stuff :face_with_peeking_eye: (and I’m not even getting started on AI integration, which is also one of the reasons I’m so excited about Discourse…)

Maybe the fact I’m migrating an already mature community also adds to the headache: it’s not at all the same thing as starting with a blank slate and having the opportunity to let community culture develop in symbiosis with the tool that houses it.

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I did, quite a lot, earlier on (when I trialed Discourse in August). Less now, I have to say. I have often found myself sent to topics on Meta for which it’s not clear if the information is still actual, or the threads are super long and I get overwhelmed before getting halfway through. I’m also wary of chatbot rabbit-holes (I tend to run down them very fast). But maybe I should give it another go.

I’ll definitely do that, thanks for the encouragement!

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That’s different. You said you could start wordpress and post something. I’m saying that you can start Discourse and post something. Making a blog that people will stick around on is also more complicated than posting something. Maybe the analogy doesn’t work.

And as someone who’s made their living with Discourse for almost a decade and can’t do the simplest of tasks in Wordpress, I might not be a good person to ask!

But yeah, everything on your list is pretty hard (figuring out how many emails a particular person wants? And if the moderator is mad about getting notifications you might need a new moderator–if they’re doing their job and being online all the time, they won’t get many because they’ll see them in their browser, but it’s pretty easy for them to adjust that and for a new forum the default is to send lots of email so that the people know the site exists, and lots of those things are hard because they are hard problems, not because Discourse makes them hard.

Automated nudges? At the right times? That’s pretty hard.

That’s my bread and butter! But even when you have access to the data (and you don’t until you figure out how to scrape it from Facebook, I’m pretty sure, and is that even legal?) it’s still complicated. I’m cleaning up a mess now from someone doing a bad job on a migration and making all the users mad.

Yes! That’s much harder. Everyone has expectations and even the things that are horrible about a given system people will be mad when they are missing!

So, while I’m likely irrationally defensive on behalf of Discourse and there are some things that could be easier, to me, much of what you’re trying to do is just plain hard, regardless of the platform you’re trying to configure.

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That wasn’t really the intent of my analogy: it was more “does the tool, out of the box, do the job you need it to do sufficiently well” (WordPress: blogging; Discourse: community). But yeah, the analogy has limits and we could go down a deep rabbit hole picking it apart!

:joy:

Of course that cannot be known. But what setting will satisfy/be tolerable to the biggest number of people, yes – that’s the information user research provides (unfortunately I don’t have the means to run it on my community, I need to guesstimate it).

She’s not mad, she pointed it out. And as you say, mentioned she needed to fix her notification settings. But our “average users” will not do that.

This is the problem: based on the initial feedback of my moderator, it’s clear that setting is going to be too “intrusive/swamping” for our user base.

I am absolutely not denying they are hard problems. But then, an interface can make dealing with a hard problem more or less easy. Discourse does not provide me (or I haven’t seen it) with a clear, understandable representation of this behaviour (sending e-mails) in my community. I see a long list of settings; I need something that looks more like user stories. I appreciate that there are descriptions under the setting names and values, but unless I already have a clear mental image of how this aspect of Discourse works (like you most certainly have given your extensive experience with it), it is very difficult for me to understand what each of these does. Tell me the story of how this affects my member’s experience of the tool, and ask me which scenario or alternative story I want: that works.

FWIW all our documents are in Google Docs and not Facebook (index here for the curious) and all the video posts from Facebook have indeed been scraped, legal or not. If I were too preoccupied by that aspect, I wouldn’t be running a community where we tell people how much insulin to give their cats :sweat_smile: – and honestly, regarding Facebook, I’m not going to have any qualms about taking off with content that should by right be ours.

No worries, I understand – I think it’s great that Discourse is a tool that people are passionate about. It’s an asset :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback!

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But once there are a few more users, it won’t be so chatty. Understanding and managing bootstrap mode – it’s actually set up to work out of the box by sending a zillion emails to the new people (who presumably are more patient like your moderator) and it’ll automatically tone it down if you don’t figure out how to change the setting yourself.

Oh, that’s a relief! Someone clever, and perhaps someone clever with a few tools and the help of https://ask.discourse.com/ might be able to coerce that into the Docs plugin.

Agreed, and they’ve mostly done a good job with that, I think. And make sure you learn how to use the search on settings–you almost never want to look at a list of them. Just blindly type stuff in the search box–it searches the names, descriptions, and values of all of those settings. It’s amazing.

EDIT:

Yeah, and I don’t mean to imply that your frustrations aren’t real or valid, just that I’m not clear what actionable steps are to solve any of those issues.

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Not much to add but I wanted to thank you for sharing your story and describing your frustrations.

A good outcome would be that you get to a successful Discourse community. A great outcome would be that Discourse is tweaked to make this journey easier.

For myself, I made as few changes as I could and added only one theme component, and not immediately. I had the advantage of a relatively technical target audience, but I know that at least one smart person felt baffled by the interface.

I suppose my approach was this: don’t aim to recreate what you had before, aim to make something which works for your community. I wanted relatively low friction and I wanted people to be able to find what they wanted and contribute.

Part of my minimalist approach is to use rather few categories, and initially not to worry about tags. One friction point for the new poster is which category to choose, so the first one is always a catch-all and I’m explicit that the mods can re-categorise if needed.

I experimented with the default view, the front page can either be the categories or the latest. I only tried those two, and switched more than once.

The only thing I added was Topic List Previews

Theme Component which allows you to customise the layout for many of the Topic Lists across Discourse, fundamentally adding thumbnail previews and excerpts

What this does is adds text snippets and image thumbnails to each topic in a list, making the list of topics more attractive and more self-explanatory.

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I really empathize with the feeling of being overwhelmed with all the settings at first.

Something I’d caution against is letting perfect be the enemy of the good - there is no perfect setup, things are going to need to be tweaked over time as your community settles in. It’ll always be a little bit in flux. It’s also very likely that much of the time spent designing a setup can be thrown out the window once it goes live and users start throwing feedback your way (I’ve learned this the hard way!).

Something that’s helped our community is to have a group of beta testers. They have their own group, they have their own category, and there’s a specific theme for testing components. They’ve provided a lot of great feedback over the years, and can spot potential pitfalls or things I hadn’t thought of.

I think just getting started with a minimum viable product will help immensely. As you get feedback from users, you can adjust as needed, adding or removing plugins/components or adding/removing categories, etc. You don’t have to have a fully fledged out category tree right away, you can learn over time what works. If you’re nervous, bring over some users before fully launching to get their feet wet and get their feedback - having users familiar with discourse will help in the transition as well.

This all allows your community to help dictate the feel of your discourse instance, giving them a say in the matter, which enables them to feel more connected to it.

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Can I ask why would you ever want to host such a small group on your own hardware? If you think installing and configuring Discourse is difficult, who is going to be up for the 24x7 job of making sure the computer does not get hacked top to bottom? I have a background in computer security, and I can say in all honesty, I would never host my own server unless I was running something that had a guaranteed revenue of at least $1M per year.

It’s one thing to take such risks when you are implementing your personal blog. It’s quite a different level when 8K people are trusting you to protect their identities. What are you going to do when the hackers steal your user database and then start sending out phishing emails that claim to come from you? What are you going to say to the people who reuse passwords, and the stolen password works on a broker site that keeps the person’s life savings? Why take on that risk?

Properly securing a computer and watching it constantly costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. The people who choose to do that on their own are usually programmers and security professionals, and for them, it’s as much a hobby as it is a job. Paying Discourse $20/month and letting them watch the security logs, and do backups, and do upgrades, is cheap.

By the way, I am interested in getting a pointer to any thread you start on your FB account suspension. I run a 15K user group on FB, and they suspended my account for three weeks. During that three week period, all of my content on FB just disappeared, throwing our group into total chaos. That event alone opened my eyes that FB is a psychotic, out-of-control AI that just randomly suspends people without cause, and their backend systems for resolving such mistakes are completely dysfunctional.

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Thanks! And yes, definitely, I am a big believer in perfect being the enemy of good. I have to say, though, that the way things are presented in the Discourse admin make it easy to fall in the “perfect” trap.

Thinking about this this morning, I was asking myself what would help steer me, as a new admin, towards a “good enough” setting. What’s missing for me is a clear sense of hierarchy and priority in the different “dimensions” I need to think about as a community builder. Maybe this exists and I haven’t found it, but maybe something like a high-level “inventory” of the features and functionalities that make a community, where I can indicate what’s important and less important to me, and then be offered a somewhat prepackaged collections of settings to implement.

An example to try and make my thinking clear (maybe I need to think about this more and develop this idea in a different post). On a fresh install, I could have a checklist which asks me how important various aspects of the community are going to be:

  • structuring content with tags or categories, or both
  • allowing members to interact through chat
  • the visual design

Realising as I write this that it isn’t very clear, I need to think more about it to present my idea in a way that’s comprehensible. I think what I have in mind is a kind of setup wizard which speaks in “user stories” (using quotes because it’s probably not exactly that) rather than technical settings, and helps me translate them into settings. Maybe there could even be an AI chatbot that helps parse my natural language explanations and is designed to guide me and keep me on track of this “simple configuration” I need to get started, and who has access to the settings or can surface them for me. Ask Discourse does some of this I guess…

(OK will think more and come back!)

This is very much how I have always intended to do things – however, my difficulties are really already just in getting to this minimum viable community platform, considering the nature and needs of my community. I do like your idea of beta testers, which wasn’t formulated so clearly in my mind – and of having a dedicated theme to test new components, that’s not something I’d thought of doing.

The one thing that puts a lot of pressure IMHO is that I know there will be a lot of resistance in moving off Facebook, and for a lot of members, the first minutes they set foot in the “new Discourse community” are going to make or break it. So I do have to make sure the minimum viable community doesn’t prevent roadblocks to onboarding and use compared to Facebook, otherwise users will come, look around, and stick around on Facebook, which will not be helpful for my goal of migrating.

The community on Facebook is very well-oiled and efficient. It also has a lot of complexity behind the scenes to give our members this experience. We also have the pressure that we are literally, at times, dealing with life-or-death situations with our members pets. The subject matter is highly sensitive and very much linked to immediate real-world consequences. So that is also something I take into consideration. If the technical aspects of participating in the community are too much of a barrier for our members, animals will suffer and die – not all, of course, but that is the endgame. And our benchmark for ease of community participation is facebook.

To be clear, if what I say above about our role concerns anyone: I know we can’t “save everybody” :sweat_smile: and pet owners have veterinarians. But we are the francophone ressource for a niche illness – including for many veterinarians, who send their clients to us, and join our community themselves. We are not “just” a “shared interest” community, not that there is anything wrong with that, or that any community, whatever its subject matter, doesn’t have real important impact on the lives of its members. And I’m aware this does colour the way I see my role and responsibility as a community builder/founder/manager. (So we don’t go down any rabbit-holes: I have a therapist :sweat_smile:, and I’ve been rather successfully grappling with the questions of implication and responsibility and what to let go of regarding this community for eight years now :face_with_peeking_eye:.)

Thanks a lot for your kind and thoughtful message, which has helped me identify more clearly what I have missed in my “admin experience” so far, and is giving me ideas to work around that and get it in a different way :hugs:

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So, I see this less as a problem of having just the right features, then - I see this more as an organizing problem.

What I mean by that is that you’ll want to essentially develop a campaign to get your users over. I mentioned before having some trusted users join and test before launching community-wide. You’ll really want to look for your organic leaders and community champions, people who can be an enthusiastic welcome wagon. Bring them in to test your setup, give them some talking points, and have them inoculate your users to get them excited to move over. Have that group become the welcome wagon when the time comes to launch.

Having a robust how-to guide for newcomers is something I would really, really focus on - in fact, I might focus on this above almost all else. In particular, you’ll want something like a table that shows users how to do in discourse what they’re used to doing on Facebook. A walkthrough will be very, very helpful. If your users are low-tech, consider recording some short videos on how to do particular things they’re used to doing on Facebook. You’d mentioned the emails as one potential source of friction - this is just the sort of thing to include in a walkthrough. Instead of trying to predict how they will react to the emails, you can walk them through how to set their notifications themselves and relieve yourself of the mental load you’re carrying in thinking how to make it perfect for every user.

Genuinely, I would spend far, far less time on things like deciding whether to structure content by tag or category organizing and focus very heavily on making the first impression the best it can possibly be. You can always (and will always) tweak over time, but you only get one shot at welcoming them. Users are generally willing to overlook some roughness around the edges if they are earnestly and enthusiastically welcomed in a meaningful way.

If you have a launch date in mind, plan some teasers that you drop beforehand that promote all the cool things you can do on discourse (that just so happen to be things you can’t do on Facebook) - you’ll want to not disparage Facebook when you’re doing this, I would keep it narrowly focused on the good of discourse rather than the bad of Facebook, but show the kinds of things they can look forward to. Get people excited to move over. And, if you don’t have a launch date, it might be good to have one so you can backwards plan and promote.

Once you launch, have your welcome wagon do some check-ins with your frequent Facebook users - are they getting the hang of it? Do they need help? Identify the users who are enthusiastic and enjoying the new experience and encourage them to spread that energy.

You will likely have users who…I don’t know a better way to put it, but users who will be cranks about the move, just being real Negative Nellies. Do your best to neutralize this attitude immediately - these types of users are a huge mood killer to what should be an exciting thing, and can bring other users down with them. Prep your welcome wagon to take these folks aside and address their issues, or at least temper their tantrums. You may not have users like this at all, I don’t know! But honestly in every migration I’ve ever done there’s always at least one.

Something I’m getting from your posts, and forgive me if I’m off base, is that maybe it’d be helpful to sit down with someone knowledgeable to talk through your needs and coach you through the process of setting it up? I know that can be really helpful for me when I’m feeling a settings overload…it’s just easier sometimes to have a conversation.

It’s so admirable how much thought and care you’re putting into creating this space for your community!

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Yes and no – is there a clear separation between the two? Features and tools can facilitate or hinder organising. Depending on the e-mail client or calendar I use, it will be more or less easy to “manage” my e-mails or my calendar, because of the features of the tool.

When I want to implement an “idea of organisation” in a tool, whatever it is, if the settings I find in my attempt to implement are not self-explanatory and findable for me, as a user, then it makes organisation more difficult.

Yes, and that is underway, and is not what I’m struggling with. I honestly think my understanding of the challenges of “people migration” for my community and the vision I have for how to do it are “good enough” at this stage. My problem is on the one hand in figuring out how to translate the ideas I have into settings/configurations to make them happen on the tool side, and on the other it is not managing to get a clear enough picture of what the tool does and how to allow me to refine my ideas through trial and error without encountering too much friction.

I really do appreciate your practical advice regarding migration, and it’s indeed the right way to approach things, but I’m already on it.

That is correct – and how I’m trying to “use” the community here. It works to some extent, but at other times it’s a little frustrating (and making me think very hard about what new members in my community might feel like sometimes!) because the result is more information, more things to choose from, or even coming away with the feeling that “the problem is me” when I express that I find certain things complicated, or that I’m failing to adequately convey the precise nature of the problem I’m having. (And sure, maybe the problem is me to some extent, of course.)

It would indeed be great to have a “Discourse expert” to hash things out with one-to-one or worry about the implementation. In my mind, and as somebody who would have been playing this role a decade or two ago in the blogging space, this is a consulting gig, unless one is lucky to have such a person in their network who is willing to help out in exchange for a nice meal. But in their absence, that’s what online support communities are there for, aren’t they? :sweat_smile:

(By all means, if somebody reading this is so inspired… but honestly this is not something I would consider requesting of somebody I don’t know…)

Thanks!!

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I think we have a misunderstanding, unless a VPN cloud server is “my own hardware”?

So are you saying, basically, that nobody without a strong background in computer security should be self-hosting Discourse?

To me, either you have misinterpreted what I am doing, or you have “requirements” for somebody to be eligible for self-hosting which pretty much exclude anybody who is not running a sizeable business. I didn’t get the impression from my time on Meta that this was the profile of all self-hosters – or am I completely deluding myself here?

Rest assured that if the $20/month plan was sufficient for the needs of my community, I wouldn’t be self-hosting.

Looks like exactly the same experience I went through! you can start digging around my blog with this post… enjoy the reading :sweat_smile:

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