It seems to me that most of the people coming to Discourse are doing so because they are fed up with Facebook. Rather than scattering all the various aspects of this - problems with FB AI-based administration, problems in doing the migration, etc - all over different categories here, it would be nice to accumulate all the FB related posts in a single category of its own. That also gives Discourse staff a place to author some pinned posts explaining why an admin should want to do the migration at all. Finally, this category would be a place to accumulate many user stories about mistreatment by FB. Seeing all of those stories in one place helps people to understand the reality of this widespread abuse.
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I think that less than one in a thousand (or 10k) discourse sites has come from Facebook. Iâve done over a hundred migrations from other platforms and zero from Facebook.
A message about Facebook that you replied to was seven years old.
Is it even possible to get your data from Facebook to do a migration? If so, and you have a budget, you can post in Marketplace.
Iâm just a user here, but this isnât really a place for complaining about other platforms. Itâs for helping people use discourse.
If you want a place to complain about Facebook, it would make sense to create your own community for that.
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Facebook has about 2 billion daily active users, and Reddit has about 108 million daily active users. This is more than 50% of the active discussion forum market, so I donât believe that only one in 1000 forums originated on Facebook.
No one really âmigratesâ from a FB forum because they have too much content locked down. For my own group of 15K users I wouldnât be surprised if the Discourse forum only has 100 members after the first year. Itâs going to take a lot of time and patience to develop a strategy to work people into trusting and using Discourse. So I donât view migration as being a) possible or b) fast.
Long-term, I intend to keep both forums and would not want to lose FBâs enormous network effects. How to coordinate content across forums is going to take time to work out. I just know I need something like Discourse to act as a reliable repository for information, because Facebook will just randomly wipe out everything for completely arbitrary reasons, without cause.
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there you go⌠why Discourse is
just
better
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I donât think we have enough evidence of the need for a category yet, but I welcome more topics about migrating from facebook (and any other platform for that matter).
We can think about what affordance to provide for this, but in the meantime, feel free to share links to any related topics here, or we can come up with a tag to use.
And if you have stories of your own, please feel free to start separate topics to share them.
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I do think Discourse needs to reconsider their key selling points. From my perspective, two of those selling points are:
#1 âWe treat you like a human beingâ. Discourse is real humans helping real humans, and for anyone sufficiently traumatized by the FB AI, thatâs getting to a basic and core human need.
#2 âWe protect your informationâ. That one requires some explanation, but once people understand that when FB AI glitches and suspends your account, that every post, every resource, and every comment you ever made just disappears, selling them on the idea of information permanence has real value.
Discourse spends too much time selling the idea of âcommunityâ when it lacks any of Facebookâs network effects. I understand the way they mean it, but it can be true and also be a bad selling proposition. I also believe the lack of threaded discussions hurts them, at least when users are coming over from systems like FB and Reddit. Itâs pointless to have a religious war over which system is better and why. The fact is that the FB crowd is trained to like threaded discussions, and they will just feel immediately at home if that method is preserved. They could make the choice of threaded discussions a setup option for a forum.
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I was imagining a category where eventually dozens of admins would be able to tell their sad stories of why they had to diversify from FB. The accumulation of that in one place is a persuasion tool for other admins on FB, helping them to understand they have a problem they may not have realized they have.
For sure you at least need a Facebook tag!
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Maybe try a little less bashing a little more trying to understand the the Discourse community, the Discourse software or anything about the interests or goals of anyone associated with the Discourse ecosystem.
People are bending over backwards to be welcoming and courteous to you butâŚ
I have been on Meta since 2014 or 2015 and this is the first time I have thought of looking for a mute user button.
Please take a different tack and try a different approach. I think you will like the response.
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Okay, I guess I am too direct, and I apologize for that. I will try to learn the community better before making too many suggestions.
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All good @westes , thanks for understanding my intent.
Off topic: Have you setup a Discourse instance? You and @stephtara are both looking to bail on FB which I 100% get. Maybe post up your site and plans. I am hoping to move the CSF leaker community off of FB so following your efforts might be demonstrative.
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As I said above, I will keep Facebook and might even invest in advertising dollars to grow it at some point. But I think Discourse will be the actual repository of data that is authoritative, because Facebook cannot be trusted with anything that needs to be permanent.
My hope is that Facebook will lead people to pay a subscription fee for the Discourse group. So it will be a marketing vehicle for the Discourse group and still be a valuable resource for the Facebook community. How to balance those objectives is something I will take a year to figure out.
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Iâm not saying that lots of people arenât using Facebook. Iâm saying that they havenât come to discourse. Thereâs very little discussion mentioning Facebook other than Facebook logins.
They just arenât here.
Thatâs why people rarely transition away.
And thatâs the price of having a âfreeâ forum and ânetwork effectsâ. If youâre not the customer, youâre the product.
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I think I have some insight regarding why 
â itâs a change with a steep cost to community members, not the least going from âan extra on a platform one is already using and tightly embedded inâ to âa whole new worldâ. For the admin too, be it regarding the technology or the community management mechanics which will have to be wielded to offset the cost of change to members.
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I dont see why we couldnât do this tbh @mcwumbly We have others too like flarum phpbb and mybb , albeit sparsely used
Fwiw, I didnt see a problem with anything you said. Being direct, or even a tad negative, isnt a crime.
And you werent discourteous in my book.
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Super interesting thread, and I agree with the posters about the âswitching costsâ that users undergo when they move away from Facebook and onto an independent platform like Discourse. Cory Doctorow has written extensively on this, hereâs an example article Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Social Quitting â Locus Online but the concept of switching costs infuses a lot of his writing, especially on Enshi**ification (which is what has happened to Facebook).
I think as the understanding of Enshi**ification becomes more mainstream and widespread, the Discourse community has much to gain by being able to offer safe alternatives. There will always be some people who will stick with the Facebooks and Xs simply because of inertia. But activated users will vote with their feet.
Do we need a whole Category on Facebook pain? Probably not, IMO.
Do we need some good user stories here on Meta from Facbook Group mods turned Discourse sysadmins? YES!!!
If you search Meta for âleaving Facebookâ there isnât a huge amount here yet. In all my communities I resist creating Categories will-nilly until there is already some decent amount of discussion on a topic. A good intermediate step is to create a Tag for #facebook to make it easier to find that content.
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Totally agree. Or maybe even more specific â#facebook-migrationsâ to make it clear itâs not about complaining about FB, but about making a migration work on every level, technical and social.
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That is not the case at all, at least in our business.
Anyway, I started playing with Discourse to migrate a community from Facebook back in 2014, and also did a successful one here at the company for a big customer, so itâs not like they are a myth. Also, both migrations were very successful.
In both cases, the most important thing is what is your capacity to pull people to the new place. In both cases, we have a large number of benefits to members to migrate over so they came in droves and the Facebook community was abandoned organically when everyone moved.
We keep repeating this point over and over here, you canât simply create a Discourse instance and expect people to come over, you need a whole go to market strategy and several compelling reasons for users to migrate. If you donât have that, you are doomed to fail.
Here it is facebook-migration
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Thanks for the new tag!
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Yeah, no objection to doing this (thanks Falco) Many of the related topics at the bottom here could get the tag.
(Maybe we should get some AI auto tagging wired up)
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