It's no secret that social media kills entire communities. I've seen blog and forum projects fail simply because it's easier to do things through social media. I've even seen businesses prefer to create a simple Facebook page or a Tumblr blog rather than a real, professional website, simply because it's easier to manage, cheaper (much cheaper), and allows them to reach millions of people with an investment equivalent to: $0
That's right, it's a point in favor of social media, but what happens when this starts to look threatening to a community like DesdeLinux ? Well, that makes admins like me stop just worrying about being simple bastard operators from hell and start questioning the future of the community they've been working with.
Anyway, what I mean is that lately I've seen the almost overwhelming growth of the DesdeLinux community on G+, and I say overwhelming by community standards, considering that in the community forum we only have 624 registered members and the forum is almost a year old, while in the G+ community we have 852 members in a matter of… two weeks? And that makes me think about a lot of things.
Clearly, the community has completely overtaken the forum in every way, and it pains me to say it, but it's obvious that the community is much more dynamic and easier to take everywhere (the Android app, for example) and allows for many more features like Hangouts, events, comments, +1s, and much better integration in general. Of course, it has disadvantages, and one of them is obvious: it's a real pain to follow a conversation thread . Don't tell me otherwise, because it bothers me too much to have to scroll through conversations or search way down in the categories without filters or anything like that. It also lacks tools like BB code, which is incredibly useful when you want to structure a post with anything from lists to code.
But social media will always have a greater impact, there's no denying it, and I see it not only in the numbers but also in the number of active users on the forum and how much fewer posts there are, which were already low, now they're even lower… it's complicated and sometimes makes me wonder: What if it affects the blog? It's something many have told me, and I honestly can't say for sure that it directly affects the blog, although I also can't be arrogant and let the team rest on their laurels, but I can say that they are two very different things. The blog and the community/forum have little to do with each other structurally and are completely independent of one another. The thing is, within the community you can write really long and very good posts, but I doubt that will take away the blog's prominence; there's simply no comparison… yet.
Regarding the forum, I can only think of three possibilities:
- Close the forum and leave all the leading role to the community.
- Close the community and leave the leading role to the forum.
- Restructure and redesign the entire forum to make it really attractive to users.
And this is the point I wanted to make with all of this. For me, having these tools on social media isn't a bad thing; I see them as a double-edged sword that must be used wisely, since the pressure from one motivates us to improve the other. The forum needs many things: a redesign to give it real personality, a responsive and lightweight design that allows users to truly take the forum with them anywhere, improved editing tools so they can be used comfortably from any device (touchscreen or desktop/laptop), integration of unique accounts ( OpenID/Mozilla Persona ), and improvements to the interface's usability. That would make the forum a more attractive tool to use, but is it worth improving one of our services to compete with, ironically, another of our services? That's something we also need to question, and see what really matters to the community. whether the convenience and integration that G+ provides (at the cost of having to be glued to Google) or the do it yourself path but more complicated and with less acceptance of the forum (and which allows us to maintain control over our actions and data).
The truth is that all we have to do is not at all little, it really is not silly and we have to sit down and argue with force. Everything should be done via comments, I don't want to fragment the discussions between forum, blog and community, I want to have everything on neutral ground and be able to really debate, be able to get a better overview and perhaps create an action plan. It should be noted that any action that could be taken regarding this issue will not be immediate or simply nothing is done, this is purely my initiative and I lack the time and knowledge to do everything quickly, as well as the resources and time. involves the entire decision-making process, blah blah blah ...
From now on it is up to you to debate the issue.