This was a few weeks back, and life happened in the meantime. To my surprise back then, it indeed seems that “migrating from a successful facebook group to Discourse” doesn’t actually seem to be a common situation here:
Migrating a successful community from Facebook is, however, the situation I’m in, and I think it can explain some of the frustrations I’m encountering getting started with Discourse. Moving a thriving community from a sticky, integrated, established platform like facebook presents different challenges than starting a community from scratch, or moving a struggling/non-thriving community over from some other platform, where things are not working great. As @chapoi says (emphasis mine), it has to do with:
Background about my situation these two topics, if needed:
I’ve just spent some time now going through all the facebook-migration topics I could find to take a shot at synthesising where we’re at regarding this issue, quotes at hand. Some are ancient, but I’ve tried to pick out those that are still relevant for today’s discussion. Forgive the long post (again, I know) but I think there is value in bringing things together.
Why Facebook group migration matters
I’m wondering if the sentiment expressed in this post from 2018 might not explain somewhat why “migrating facebook groups to discourse” isn’t a bigger or more visible preoccupation so far here on meta:
Happy that this seems to be changing:
Beyond my personal issues, why should Discourse/Meta care about facebook group migration? Because Facebook groups are huge. For many people (me included), they are the highest value the platform offers and what keeps people there.
“Competition”
Facebook groups work. I have personally been looking for an alternative for years, and there aren’t many, aside from Discourse. I have known forums which have “bled out” to facebook groups, and this also seems to be an ongoing preoccupation for Discourse communities – the fact that facebook groups represent some kind of competition for the communities we are trying to build on Discourse.
The open web
In addition to that, I believe that for the good of the web (and the world), we need to work on freeing ourselves (collectively) from the tyranny of “Big Platform” (right). I’m not alone. For example:
Building platforms like Discourse or Mastodon is part of that. But we all know that having the tools is not enough. Quoting freely Doctorow’s Law of Enshittification: people won’t leave crap platforms they’re locked into unless there is an extremely strong pull to do so, and a sufficiently frictionless alternative.
Like others, I am doing what I can to pull us in what I feel is the right direction (including contributing to rebooting the blogosphere). Finding a realistic alternative to Facebook groups for community builders like myself is part of that plan. That is why I care.
There are many good people doing valuable things who are trapped on Facebook, and I would very much like to be able to give them a way out.
I want to write another topic on how I see the integration of Discourse with other open source tools can create an ecosystem comparable to what we use Facebook for now.
Switching costs
In the various discussions I surveyed here on Meta, the question of switching costs comes up again and again, in different ways, over the years.
Starting in 2014… to this day:
This is not a detail, or something that can be solved just by telling people to get over it and move. Let’s look at what these switching costs are made of a bit more closely, and what could be done to offset them.
Most “normal people” do not “live online” anywhere else than on Facebook (and maybe Instagram, and WhatsApp group chats). They barely know how to properly search for something with Google, let alone type/copy a URL in their browser address bar. Online is Facebook.
People who are already using Reddit, or Mastodon, or even Bluesky: they are not the problem. But they are a minority.
Platform integration
I think that one thing we all recognise as Facebook’s strength is that it brings everything together in one place.
Here are some advantages of facebook “integration” for a community on that platform (facebook group):
integration of community notifications with all the other notifications in Facebook, that the person is already monitoring day in and day out, which creates an easy pull back into the community at no extra cost
content from the community just “shows up” in the person’s usual online activities (via the Facebook news feed), also bringing them back to the community without any extra effort on their part
members can easily connect outside the community through their facebook accounts (friending, following, Messenger conversations), allowing friendships to grow through the “life already shared on Facebook”, which then in turn benefits the community (stronger relationships between members)
the community is very easily found by people who need it, either through search inside Facebook or by leveraging the various networks inside Facebook (other groups, pages, asking on one’s wall, “suggested groups”, etc)
Platform familiarity
For people whose whole online world is pretty much Facebook, offering anything outside of Facebook in itself is already a huge barrier. The simple action of going to a website or installing/using a different app on their phone, which may be trivial to us, is not so for them.
Even if that in itself is not a roadblock, changing tools (for anybody!) is going have a cost. There are differences in how one posts, comments/replies, how notifications are managed, extra features (badges? tags? trust levels? quoting?), how one accesses another person’s “profile”, the design is different…
Offset switching costs by providing more value
We all agree that the key to this kind of migration is to be able to offer more value to community members on Discourse than in the Facebook Group that they know and love, and is seamlessly integrated with the rest of their online life (aka Facebook).
Being in control of the Facebook group you are migrating from gives you some control to limit the experience on the Facebook side as you build up the Discourse side:
There is no shortage of ideas on this matter – the flexibility of Discourse makes a lot of things possible, too.
However, the more established the community on Facebook, the more difficult it will be to attract enough initial members to get some momentum going for that value to be made visible.
Let’s not forget user experience
A lot of the discussion regarding how the community on Discourse needs to provide value that members will not find on Facebook focuses on features and discussion. This is perfectly valid. Discourse has many features that can be used to provide a richer “community experience” than facebook groups. But that is not enough.
I think this is missing the point that unless the access to said great content functions “well enough” for people, it means nothing:
Facebook has invested huge sums of money in making its platform as frictionless and sticky as possible, to keep people there. That is the benchmark (of frictionlessness) that Discourse is up against, when it comes to migrating communities from Facebook.
I think this is an important point. The interface you are used to will always feel “easier” to use, because you’ve been doing the same thing with it for years. The interface of the new platform will not only have to be as good, but better, because you are not committed to it yet – if you hit any snag, you are likely to turn away, particularly if there is a nice cushy comfortable familiar alternative waiting for you there.
UX/design/interface are paramount – especially in a context where your users are people who have been conditioned to one way of doing things for many years, and where getting an initial critical mass of members to the new platform to jumpstart the migration is necessary to create the added value which will convince the bulk of the community to take the plunge.
The best features in the world for community-building have no value in of themselves – only through enough people using them. And what will “make or break” having people staying around to use them is their first contacts with the interface.
There are also features, which we may consider as “added value”, like titles for topics, which can actually generate a lot of friction (and therefore decreased user experience for the new member trying to contribute). See conversation following here:
And what about admins and community builders?
The first-line “users” of Discourse are the community admins and builders. Without them, no community member will even set foot on the platform. Here, too, the bar facebook sets is very high:
Discourse is far superior in terms of capacity, features, independence, moderation tools, etc. It’s a no-brainer. But the experience of setting things up (I’m not talking about installation, because that is a one-time overhead that can be dealt with) is infinitely more complex than for a facebook group.
Of course, the tool is more powerful, has more functionality, so some of that is normal. And if you’re starting from scratch with your community, it’s probably manageable. But if your competition for your future Discourse community is your own thriving Facebook group, you are going to have to do a lot of tweaking and fiddling and preparing and organising and adjusting and customising and setting-fixing upfront, to make sure that the precious and valued community members you have managed to talk into going along for the ride to your “new digital home” don’t have a disappointing first contact with the platform. And as I’ve tried to demonstrate in this topic, the bar for that is going to be higher than “out of the box” Discourse.
When we talk of user experience (I know the Discourse Team is aware of this, of course) we are also talking about the admin’s user experience. So how does that experience of trying to set up Discourse to migrate a facebook group to go for the Facebook-wannabe-Discourse community builder? This is what I’ve been trying to give feedback on and share in some of my previous topics and posts, and I sometimes got the impression I was misunderstood.
Wrap-up
First, sorry for writing so much, and for all the quotes. But I wanted to show that this is not a fringe, isolated issue that I’m dealing with. I certainly have my shortcomings, but there is a wider “facebook migration” issue at stake here. I also don’t want anybody to think I’m ungrateful or overly critical of Discourse and all the wonderful people contributing to it. I think it’s a great platform and I’m going to make it work for my community, but I think it has even more potential, which I’d love to see it reach!
The key points I’d like to make:
facebook group migration is a “use case” that might be worthy of more attention than it has had over the last years (at least, as is reflected on Meta)
both admins and members “coming from Facebook” arrive with high expectations in terms of frictionlessness (and integration)
setting up a Discourse instance for a facebook group migration has different “requirements” in terms of community builder work than creating a new community from scratch or setting up a good home on Discourse for one that is struggling elsewhere
the migration strategy, in terms of added value to be provided on the Discourse side to draw users in, cannot limit itself to content and interaction quality, but must also include interface/UX for naive/facebook-formatted users
the main obstacles I see so far to Discourse being a “competitive” alternative to Facebook groups are the complexity of initial configuration for a community builder who is discovering the tool, and the “functionality overwhelm” of the interface for new community members who might not have very high digital literacy (which increases the burden on the community builder)
As far as my community migration is concerned, I’m looking forward to sharing more about the “migration strategy” aspect once I’ve managed to untangle myself from all the configuration and setup stuff.
I’m of course happy to hear about other “facebook migration” stories, and obviously, any responses to what I’ve laid out here. Again, sorry for being so verbose.
I know this looks a little like a quote-dump at times and there is some redundancy, sorry about that. I’ve added years in the source mentions if they aren’t recent, as I know Facebook and Discourse have evolved over the years – although I’ve paid attention to only keep quotes that still seemed valid today.
[fixed – jump to the first real comment!] Yikes, all the post titles appeared on top of the quotes. Trying to fix this. Markdown looks right, why is it doing this?
I think it tries to highlight that this isn’t a quote from this topic, but that you quoted from another topic. The link offers an easy way to look into that topic to get more context.
I don’t think there is an easy workaround. You could remove all the Discourse magic by removing the topic and post attribute:
[quote="stephtara"]
Over the last days I have come to realise it is a key element in my issues, that might have been a bit of a blind spot until now.
[/quote]
This is a compelling case for a pathway from FB to Discourse. I imagine many communities use FB groups (and Discord - barf) because they’re “free,” and any alternative with a cost would be a hard sell. But some would see the value. I’d love to see more migration away from corporate walled gardens like FB. I suppose the dream would be for a.) an all-in-one scrape-and-migrate tool, and b.) a pre-configured Discourse setup as familiar as possible to migrant users.
Thanks! I did fix them all the same (and filed a bug – TBC – because it seems to me that what I see in the visual editor should match what gets published!)
@ToddZ glad to hear that! Honestly, I’m not sure the “free” part is the most significant reason communities are on Facebook. I think it’s because people are already there, and it’s super easy (a dozen clicks) to set one up, invite your friends, who invite theirs, and off you go. Now, the fact it’s free definitely means that even paying for the basic hosted tier ($20/month) is going to be a very hard sell. I’d pay it for mine, if the basic tier provided what my community needs (it doesn’t).
If we dream a bit: I think a really interesting first step would be:
a “package” of standard settings/configuration, probably with a few plugins and components bundled in
a proper “fakebook” base theme (tried the current one, wasn’t there yet, though I liked the idea)
that together turn “out of the box” Discourse into something, maybe a bit simplified on the surface, that will not feel too alien to Facebook migrants.
This could also come with a user-friendly wizard that collects information from the community builder in “human terms” regarding some aspects of the community needed for configuration choices – and then will set up the corresponding configuration.
For example, there could be questions like:
how tech-savvy are the average members of the community expected to be?
do you want people to receive lots of e-mail notifications, or not?
is it important that all members in the community can chat and direct message each other?
do you want to put everybody in one “forum” (= category), or do you have more than one?
are there groups of users in your community, aside from the moderators, who need “special powers” on all or part of the community?
This is just off the top of my head, some user research with facebook group admins would probably help pinpoint what information to ask for.
FWIW this kind of more human-language interface to the settings would also be useful to other first-time Discourse admins – step further than Connecting site settings to documentation, which is already a great plan!
When it comes to scraping/copying content over, I’m not sure how useful that really is. In an ideal world where Facebook had a proper export button, that would be great, but that’s not going to happen. I’ve toyed around with browser scripts that can save posts and comment threads, but it’s super tedious to use.
For my community, there are some important posts that we will copy over manually, but most of what is on Facebook will just have to stay there… I think the work involved in getting a proper scraping/import system working would just not be worth it.
What would be interesting, however (that is more part of the “migration strategies” chapter I didn’t really detail yet), are tools to help “plant” Discourse topics in Facebook in a way that will encourage people to check them out on Discourse, like what @oshyan mentioned. It would help bridge the “integration gap” somewhat during the migration phase.
and I have to say it makes my topic quite unreadable 
