In moving a community from a private group on Facebook to Discourse, I’m wondering if there is an opportunity to open up parts of it and make them public. With the move, the community is going to gain structure (see Structuring an active support community migrating from Facebook). The community that “inspired” the one on Facebook is partially public, and I am a big believer in “keep it public unless there is a good reason to make it private”. Public content is more findable, more visible, can help more people, and it also can lower the barrier to joining if you get to actually see what you are joining.
What is making me hesitate is the migration context (see Migrating from Facebook: specific challenges, and some thoughts) – if I were starting from scratch I would certainly be thinking differently, but there, the hope is to manage to “win over” a large chunk of the existing community, and I fear that being “in the open on the internets” will have a chilling effect regarding participation for my community.
I’m toying with leaving certain parts public, but not all. Maybe the welcome area? the “supply closet” space where people can give/sell material they don’t need anymore? how about questions about food, is that really an issue if it’s public? But then, I’m thinking that a community of not very technologically sophisticated users might have a hard time with “oh, here’s it’s public, but there it’s private”.
I guess I should go “all private” for simplicity’s sake, but it hurts my “open web” heart a bit. Perhaps I also need to accept that 2026 is not 2006 anymore, and the internet has changed a lot.
Does anybody else have thoughts to share regarding how to deal with private/public in medical/paramedical (even though here it’s “animal medical”) support communities?
And when migrating, how much should one try to preserve the current community culture, versus change/influence it with the move?
New members will have to find the community – that is what happens now on facebook. Their cat gets a diabetes diagnosis, the sky falls on their head and they search for “cat diabetes” on Facebook and find our group (it’s the “strongest” one on the platform). Sometimes, rarely, they google, and find the facebook group through the website. There are also cases where they post in another cat-related facebook group and somebody points them to us. Sometimes their veterinarian sends them.
Whatever choices we make on the Discourse side, the “acquisition” part of the ecosystem is going to be altered. I intend to find a way to keep the facebook group alive (low-maintenance) to funnel facebook users to the community on Discourse, but I’m also hoping that with a better web presence people will find us that way too. Our documentation will be moved from Google Docs to public pages on Discourse, so that should be indexed (I’m assuming?) and I’ve also been thinking about revamping the website on the TLD for better visibility.
Members often discuss private/personal issues: lack of support from loved ones and even spouses, disagreements/dissatisfaction with their veterinarian (we pay close attention to keeping it civil), information on their work schedules and finances, etc. I don’t see them talking about that in public the way they do now in private, and they are necessary issues to cover in our support group.
However, there are other aspects which would be viable in public. Also, if you have a public community, there might be more of a trend towards nicknames rather than real names, as is the case on Facebook.
