I don't use any other social media. So I post everything that pops into my mind, news that I read elsewhere, things that go in my life, and often stuff that's much more personal than I would have ever posted anywhere else. The discussion is much the same as what I suppose people have on Facebook, Instagram or whatever... though it's orders of magnitude more civil and reasonable.

Roughly half the group has also abandoned all other social media, while the other half occasionally act as a Facebook diode by posting worthy or important things they might come across.

As the group now lives in several different countries on different continents, having a mechanism that helps us work around time zone constraints which isn't an unmanageable tangle of email chains is hugely beneficial. It's remarkable how making things easier to keep track of wound up facilitating a lot more discussion.

Also as it's just us we have no constraints concerning thread life cycles. So when something occurs that relates to our discussion in some ancient thread it's not a problem to revive it. So we've got threads that run over the course of five years.