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I've heard from a few places that a lot of forumites have been migrating towards facebook (this mostly goes along with people complaining about lack of forum participation).

Now, the thing is, I'm not very facebook savvy, and I can't seem to find these fabled groups. I've found quite a few pages dedicated to 40k, and I've found a number of groups dedicated to miniatures gaming in certain areas, but I haven't seen much that I'd expect to be as interesting or international as forums like these.

Are they really out there?

I follow a couple Facebook groups dedicated to different hobbies, but to be honest I don't really enjoy the format much. Harder to follow conversations, hard to find a specific conversation, no way to categorize different topics, and the moderation is usually just not very good.

I still keep dakkadakka as my main hobby haunt personally. Either I've gotten too used and attached to the format, or its actually superior to other choices. I believe the latter.

Yeah, Facebook is great for local communities. You can inform all the regulars at a certain store or in a geographic region that a tournament, gaming night, or any other event is coming up. People can arrange pick up games or trades or hobby nights...for all that stuff, Facebook is really great.

But for sustained discussion of news or strategy? For tournament reports, battle reports, or hobby primers? The trusty old forum is still the best option we have, I believe.

While I can see them as helpful for local communities, I don't think they provide any service that a traditional web forum can't. Unfortunately, in my limited experience, the facebook groups tend to be "closed" at least for my interests which means you have to be logged into facebook AND a member of the group to see anything. I find that annoying to the extreme. To post? Absolutely, that's fine. To simply read stuff? No. The excuse given is that posters don't necessarily want their family, coworkers, and non-gaming friends feeds spammed with likes for weirdo things like tiny plastic toy soldiers or half naked chainmail bikini miniatures. Folks are already checking facebook for other stuff so it ends up being a one stop shopping trip for all their stuff instead of having to individually go to each forum (Tapatalk app aside). I'm really not a fan of the closed garden internet that Facebook represents.

Yes there are quite a few. Some games have more actives communites on Facebook than forums, Batman for example. They're also very good for organising a game with your club or local store.

The Age of Sigmar Facebook group (there are a few but one big main one) is about 100x more active than any of the AoS forums.

I follow probably 100+ groups so I can give you some tips... Which type of page are you interested in? There are specific game groups, painters groups, board game groups, buy/sell groups, Oldhammer groups, conversion groups, terrain groups, an anything else you could imagine. Obviously no one group will be as big as dakka (each group is like a dakka subforum), generally you will be a member of many and just scroll through at your leisure.

I am in quite a few of these fb groups, i find its a step above a forum in some respects as there is not so much anonimity.

Not really sure how to go about finding local groups unless you know the names of them, i was invited to the gaming group one.

I find them really good for random pictures of painted minis, heads up on sales, release info and trades

(also really local gaming groups for meet ups, attracting new players etc)

all of which will pop up in your feed without you having to go specifically looking for it

but a lot less use for in depth stuff or browsing around a subject where forums are far more useful

eg here are some I follow

Chibis
https://www.facebook.com/groups/241607936023872/
Kingdom Death
https://www.facebook.com/groups/863706623696679/
Mantic
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mantic.madness/
Relic Knights
https://www.facebook.com/groups/relicknights/

For This is Not a Test and general post-apocalypse modeling, miniatures, and painting stuff, I recommend my own humble Facebook group.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/905688146148353/

Some nice generic groups:

Tabletop Skirmishers

https://www.facebook.com/groups/366849060110006/

Miniature Addicts Anonymou

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Miniature.Addicts.Anonymous/

The truth is for many miniature companies, it is simply much easier to keep up to date on Facebook for product announcements than it is to keep multiple forum threads going. Also, it seems to be an emerging pattern that people like all their hobby notifications to come from one accessible source. So in theory multiple updates in Facebook to different groups, where you are only visiting one site, can give you the equivalent to visiting multiple forums. Not sure if that is good or bad, but as technology changes, so do people habits. I think there is value in both.