Oooh, an old Post of mine!
OK let me see if I can answer that one:
“What would it take to replace Facebook with Discourse?”
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the killer feature of Facebook is the user’s ‘news’ feed.
Let’s assume for a moment that Discourse has to compete with Facebook Groups, even though we know it fills a different niche.
But let’s assume you want to add a nail into Facebook’s coffin, using Discourse.
Imho, a way to do that is offer functionality that would rival Facebook’s news feed.
Facebook Groups are successful for many reasons, not least because they are easily set up non-technical people quickly and leverage a pre-existing trusted user account pool. However one of the other significant reasons they are successful is that activity on a Facebook Group is posted on participants news feed in amongst other content from other sources they subscribe too.
So for Discourse to truly compete with or ‘replace’ Facebook Groups you need to consider that feature and how to deliver it.
This leads us to the idea of having content aggregated from a number of sources. Mastodon may be a bit like Twitter, but it also aggregates from a number of sources, like a Facebook feed, but for different sites that are owned and run by different entities.
Imho Discourse is crying out for an app or an architectural extension that allows you to combine the Topics Previews of a users chosen set of instances into one view.
Currently in order to see any detail on what is going on in the different Discourse instances I’m a participant in, I have to visit different websites. That is a little clunky.
The excellent Discourse Hub app shows us the way. It shows a single view with notification badges for noteworthy activity on forums you are involved in. If that were to be expanded to actually show a single ‘Latest’ and perhaps a ‘noteworthy/watched’ Topic list that was the combination of all of the added Discourse communities that would be fantastic. Then you could scroll down and decide which community you wanted to dip into for more detail. The app already performs a form of aggregation (In order to display all the badges) and it already holds the users credentials for access to each site, so …
I could be wrong, given the architecture of disparate servers, that might be a horrible experience from a performance or usability perspective, but it would be fantastic to see how that worked out.
However, the lack of this capability has caused at least one of my migrations from Facebook Groups to fail, with users complaining they hated going to a separate place and that they could not see their Discourse posts in their Facebook news feed. This despite the huge benefits Discourse offers in other areas. I know my experience of such failure is not unique.
Mastodon performs aggregation from disparate sources. It is also a healthy open source project. Hence my reference.
I hope that makes more sense now?