As a user I just like standard forum software as established years ago. Not too much frills, just works. Think vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse, SMF. Actually there's not a lot of difference between them, and there's not many which are really bad. Don't have any experience as an admin though.
One thing that FB groups have going for it (and I agree it's a terrible interface) is that you don't have to click on anything to see posts. Whereas in discourse you only see post titles, and a tiny blurb, the FB group is kind of like a custom group news feed. It's much easier for people to scroll through, and engage with.
Unless discourse has an "inline recent posts" view? That would be superb, for users not willing to commit by default to clicking on a post. It's amazing how big a difference that can make, with the scroll-happy click-averse folks trained on Facebook.
Can I ask what are your thoughts about this a bit in between flavor: https://beautiful.demo.ed.community/latest — it shows the first parts of each post, + some images. So by just scrolling, one gets a fairly good understanding about what each post is about. But to read everything & discuss, one needs to click.
(I'm developing this, and tweaking it a bit, maybe adding a config option so it becomes even more like the Facebook feed, is maybe something I should consider, hmm)
If you look at it on a smaller screen, like a mobile, it'll look a little bit even more like Facebook, ... but maybe more text from the posts should be included.
On one side I agree, it's easier to just keep on scrolling. On the other hand: having 'unread posts sice last visit' titles only acts as a filter from which it's easy to discard uninteresting things. And I'm not afraid to miss out since after years of 'training' on the internet we're probably all very quick at seperating the interesting from the less interesting by a couple of cue words. Moreover, often I have days or even weeks between visits and if that would all be available inline it would be a wall of text without oversight. But yes if you want it the Facebook way and regularily visit and don't mind having to scroll through uninteresting stuff instead of being able to skip it at a glance, it could be pretty interesting to have this added as an option next to the standard way.
If you are looking for open source, I think Discourse is the best out there. We tried to move a community from an old phpbb forum to a newer software some years ago and checked several projects and most projects are either unmaintained or old (with old style PHP programming) or new but lack features we needed.
We ended up using NodeBB because the person who was going to maintain it was more comfortable with Javascript than Ruby.
Something brought Facebook Groups to a period of gradual decline and I haven’t forgiven them for it. Even more frustrating is I cannot put a finger on what changed them, but it seems the ones I liked a lot all just got bigger? Or, they feel bigger and less like a community somehow.
Have you found any online communities with excellent interfaces? Ideally open-source?