@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.