Facebook Group Vs Forums

The Facebook Group MazdaMiniTrucking that I have cultivated over the years has been put on PAUSE for a while, and possibly forever. The content therein is still searchable if you are a member of that group. No further member joins or discussions can take place while the group is on pause. The group cannot be made public either if you were wondering. Once a group has been made private it can never go back to public. Why Facebook doesn’t allow this? I have no clue,but are you really surprised at them?

If the group is not paused members of the group will continue to use it instead of the new forums. That defeats the purpose of what is trying to be done here.

For a while now members and myself included have been growing tired of the ways of Facebook that include:

• censorship/control (careful what you say, use stars in words like mur*er)
• loss of freedom (having to be careful what you say
• smothering of A.I. (predictive text that doesn’t work correctly)
• algorithm (like one thing, see it a million more times)
• did I mention the censorship (removal of posts by fb)
• A.I. (shrimp Jesus)
• replies to posts are now sorted firstly by what Facebook thinks is Most Relevant, YOU are no longer relevant. This creates confusion in the comments. It is like everyone is talking all over each other. Terrible structure.

So it has been decided to move to the New Forums where we can be free to speak.

Why should we continue to build a community on a platform that doesn’t care at all about you (only your data) and wants to police your every move?

Facebook has made several announcements over that past year saying that they will remove ROOMS from groups and also took away the ability to schedule posts and automate any process within groups.

Don’t even get me started on when they removed the ever so useful #TOPICS within the groups. It was incredibly useful and it was the only way we could organize topics.

Here are just a few of the things Facebook has done recently. These are headlines you can google them yourself.

• Facebook says it removed 1 million groups in past year for breaking rules
  The company is also making some changes to groups and will stop recommending health-focused communities.
• Facebook Is Getting Rid Of The Option To Make Groups “Secret” Or “Closed” Instead, users will have two options: public or private.
  And once you go Private with a group, there is no going back to public, why?
• Meta Announces the Removal of Rooms in Facebook Groups
• Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups, leaving developers and customers in disarray
• Facebook Depreciates Hashtag Topics in Groups

What will Facebook do next?
Will Facebook remove groups altogether like Yahoo did with its Yahoo Groups?

The Facebook group about Mazda Mini Trucks just doesn’t fit there anymore. We have kind of outgrown it. We are not a hobby and craft niche. We need to be able to post problems and solutions and be able to search for them later easily.

I believe given a little more time, you will see Facebook groups slowly become more useless and more will move back to Forums.

Some have mentioned using Discord. Tried that already. It sucks as well. It’s not a good way to categorize and organize topics in meaningful way. Only the old hats like me that have seen it all over the years knows what works and works well. Discord is garbage compare to a forum. Discord is like community chats on facebook, absolute garbage.

What worked very well “back in the day” was forums and forums continue to do well. It’s the perfect fit for our needs.

Reasons Forums are better:

• Better categorisation of topics and posts
• Easy to search for information and previous discussions
• Advanced features such as text formatting
• Split discussions into topics or categories
• Replies to the topic are in order as they were posted

Reasons Facebook Groups suck:

• Difficult to keep track of topics
• Personal profile needed
• Quick post turnover – easy for things to be missed
• Poor search functionality
• Playing by Facebook’s rules, which can be changed any time
• Members not necessarily in the right mindset
• Spam Bots or Bogus accounts
• Replies to posts are all over the place out of any order causing confusion

So go check out the forums.

Watch this video where I talk about it more in depth, and see how you can be entered into the drawing for a chance to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card or a Sticker Pack.