Thanks, this was a very useful read. Reminded me of my first steps online 25+ years ago, when I was very much “afraid” of the Big Unknown Internet, and there used a pseudonym – before realising, some years later, that I was building a valuable reputation online that was disconnected from my “real identity”, which led me to completely drop my pseudonym and use my real name pretty much everywhere ever since. Different trajectories, but similar reflections!
Reading your article clarified a few things (the library/coffee shop one too, but not as sharply). DF (the community) is clearly primarily a coffee shop, with a good little library that we built along the years (our documentation, mainly).
The population is 95% female (cat owners, go figure) and I remember that at the time, one of the reasons I made it private on Facebook (aside from the fact that public groups get hammered with spam accounts) and implemented pretty tight checks at the door before letting people in was my awareness of the catfishing (!) risk in strongly female online spaces. In addition to that, this is a very low-tech, not very digital-street-savvy population.
So there is a necessity for privacy not just for people’s comfort and feeling of “safeness”, but also to not expose a vulnerable population to bad actors.
That being said, as we thrive to be of public service to anybody with a diabetic cat, it’s important that we are findable and that people get a chance to see the value (and seriousness, which is uncommon in the “pet space”) of our community before signing up. Clearly, the documentation is going to play a big part here. Having the category descriptions visible, as well as the community rules and principles, some testimonials – that will help.
If I dive in a bit and think about the type of information shared and where doing it in public could present issues. Sorry it’s becoming long but it’s super helpful for me to be able to think about loud about all this.
Location
It’s precious internally to know where people are, which city or area of the city, because it can help us connect them to other members nearby in a crisis, or orient them to a veterinary hospital with the right specialties if they need one. But we probably don’t want this information to be visible to non-members
buy/sell
There is a lot of gifting/second-handing of material like syringes, glucose monitors, and even insulin. There are two issues here: the first is location (if giving in person, or to a lesser extent, you’re not going to send something from Canada to Belgium) and the second is the legally grey aspect of passing on leftover insulin. For those two reasons, this should probably happen in a private zone. We do have people who seek out our community solely to make leftover material available after the death of a pet: so far, we usually do not let these people into the group, we simply give them access to the spreadsheet where we list the offers. I plan on replacing the spreadsheet by a category once we’re on Discourse, but that doesn’t have to be done immediately. We don’t let them in the community because this usually just results in a grief-stricken post for a cat we never had the chance to help - and “dead cat” posts are a big problem in the Facebook group because the algorithm prioritises them (they get a lot of engagement) which means that everyone gets exposed to a lot of dead cats, leading to a distorted view of how “deadly” diabetes is (it’s not, actually, very well treatable and manageable). So on Discourse, we would probably give these people access to the “buy/sell” and “grief” categories and that’s pretty much it.
veterinarian disagreements
Feline diabetes is a niche topic and not all generalist vets are up-to-date on best practices. In France in particular, there is also (particularly amongst older professionals) a “I’m the doctor I know best” attitude that can be problematic. There are also pet owners who are not good at diplomatically suggesting to their vet that there might be scientific/medical advances they are not aware of. In any case, it’s precious that our community gives people a space to talk about the difficulties they face with their veterinarians (in a respectful way of course, we’re very strict about that). We also give them ressources to try and educate their vets when necessary/useful/possible, and help them identify when it really is a blocked situation that requires looking for a second opinion or changing vets. I definitely do not think that these are conversations people would be comfortable having “in public”.
The present situation regarding that on Facebook is actually already a little uncomfortable: we have a separate group for veterinarians, but they are also invited to join the main group as lurkers. So, sometimes our members will bring up issues regarding their vets without realising the vet or their colleagues are in the group. In practice however, vets have very little time to engage with the community on the vet side, let alone go and hang out in the main group. But it can happen. The fact that search in Facebook groups is pretty bad has kept this “privacy by obscurity/ignorance” situation viable so far, but as you can imagine I’m not completely comfortable with it. From my discussions with vets, they don’t really care: most of the online spaces are so prone to vet-bashing they generally never go and read “pet owner” stuff, and are extremely appreciative of how well we moderate our community in that respect. So our pet owners feel like they are in a private space for these discussions (though it might not be as private as they think, with 8k members… and more veterinarians than they imagine, often with pseudonyms), and I think that if we were having them “on the open internet” they clearly would not be possible.
personal information: family, work, schedules
Like location, knowing if somebody lives alone or not, what support they have at home or not, if they are away from home or not during the day, if they have irregular schedules – all that is important because it will influence the advice we give people regarding insulin dosage, surveillance, or dealing with a cat that is not doing well. Given the population our community is made of, it is probably better if discussions relying on this kind of very personal context happens in private. So the general support category, the dosing advice one, dealing with sick animals or emergencies, all that stays private.
food
What to feed a diabetic cat is a big topic of discussion. It’s one I’d like to be able to keep public, because there is a lot of disinformation out there, and one of our strengths is precisely our science-based approach to all this, which can amongst other things help build trust with professionals. As I see it the only “sensitive” information that might come up in these conversations is finances (but who doesn’t want to spend less on cat food?) and maybe presence/absence at home regarding distribution style (but we recommend free-feeding generally). So I think this is a topic that we could leave “public”, on the condition there is a way to mark public and private spaces in a very clear way for members.
medical training
This is another category I’d like to make public, because it is important, but for it to be most helpful to our members we’re going to be having discussions where people film themselves doing injections or the like, and I don’t see us “forcing” that kind of content to be public.
Summary
This bit is going to be a prerequisite:
Like @nathank I’m not sure my 20-year-old CSS skills are up to the challenge. Given what I’ve read in your (@HAWK ) article about how fundamental navigating public/private aspects of a community are, I would definitely join nathank in wishing for a built-in way to very clearly signpost if a space is public or not (the little locks are nice, but frankly, not sufficient imho for a non-tech population).
Assuming that works I’m left with:
- documentation (the “library” part of DF) is public
- main support areas are private (including grief support, off-topic)
- food could be public
- buy/sell needs to be private
- medical training needs to be private
- tech support (not mentioned, but no-brainer): private, so people can screenshot things and give usernames without them ending up in search engines
=> this kind of argues for a public “welcome/new members/general questions” area (but will that hold people back from participating? always that tension…)
=> a bunch of “personal” information (city, family status, etc) is something I’d planned on managing with custom user fields, can those be made visible only to members?
Regarding search engine indexing: by default, does Discourse allow all public content to be indexed?
Sorry once again for the verbose post…
