Two answers come to mind:
It’s much easier for the NSA to plug into one giant socket (Facebook) and suck out all the information, than it is to retrieve and process that amount of data from the decentralized net.
The job of creating dossiers for an entire population takes a lot of time, effort and person-hours. With facebook, creating dossiers has been effectively crowd-sourced to the very subjects of those dossiers.
NSA, if you happen to be monitoring this, I use ISIS cranks!
Back to the original question. I think you have to ask the “Unicycle Chat” group on Facebook what will bring them back. Hopefully, they can use them both.
Personally, I think the forum is great. But I’m a dinosaur when it comes to technology.
For what it’s worth, I use both. I’m actually part of like 5 different unicycle Facebook pages - Unicycle Chat, MUni chat, Road and Distance Unicycling, and Unicycle North West - and that’s about the order I prefer them in (With North West being my favourite). Unicycle Chat is mostly full of street/trials riders, and I’m not into that at all, and so I turn off notifications for it and just look at it when I can be bothered to. I like the local page because I can occasionally meet people on it and ride with them, which is what social media is all about, right? 
The forums, to me, are where I discuss techniques, gear, and all that stuff. Facebook is where I oggle at people’s awesome rides they did today, and where I get info about local rides. Two different use cases, two different sites.
There is a unicycle chat group on Facebook?
For that matter there are chat groups?
Is that why MR is atrophying?
I must be getting old.
hopefully all the other old people stick around for a while 
Unicycle Chat was good for quick answers to questions and to chat about recent developments in unicycling until a large influx of people joined who repeatedly post pictures of their unicycles next to a park bench/mountain/lake/beach/parking lot.
3500 members all posting a useless pic of their unicycle on the group every day and you spend your time sorting through crap.
Forums don’t have that problem for sure as it is tucked away in its own thread.
Just to add to the Facebook ‘UNLIKES’ go and read the terms and conditions of Facebook Messenger.
You effectively give them the right to turn on your phone and listen to your conversations whenever they choose… They may take content/pics/conversations whatever from your phone/device as they choose.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING TOO CLOSELY…
WAAAAAAYYYYY too much invasion of privacy for my liking.
Facebook feels much more “alive” than the “static” forums. There’s almost instant feedback and seems friendlier and overall much more fun and inclusive. You can also edit or delete your posts at any time without a 10 minute deadline.
To answer the op’s title question: How can we get the Facebook “Unicycle Chat” crowd back on here?
I think that ship has sailed.
Most people I know say that Facebook feels much more “alive” than the “static” forums. “There’s almost instant feedback and seems friendlier and overall much more fun and inclusive. You can also edit or delete your posts at any time without the forum’s 10 minute deadline. You have your own page, and you can create new ones. Much more interactive all around.”
I think both fb and the uni forum have their place, and I appreciate both, but the forum is where it all started for me and so many others, so it will always be the sentimental favorite for me.
Nice analysis!
Yes, their objective is very clearly to build political dossiers on the entire population. The capitalist media likes to portray everyone who has a problem with that as some sort of “privacy advocate,” and the kill list, when mentioned, tends to be treated as some sort of separate issue, as do the frequent street executions, though there is actually a Facebook page that tracks them: 3.0 per day for 2014.
This question of the Internet is an especially important part of our sport, as it is extremely rare to meet anyone who knows how to ride a unicycle, so just as we discuss the use of leg armor, gloves and other safety gear, it is worth discussing safe use of the Internet.
Wow, you guys are paranoid:D
All I see is that you either want to be on a social chit chat, close knitted network with guys that want to ride local, or you simply dont…
Who the hell wants to spy on a bunch of unicyclists whose only interest is to to conquer the trails and not the world:D
If you are that worried about “big brother” spying on you then you probably shouldn’t be using the internet at all, or a mobile phone for that matter 
Yeah, that’s what I argued initially, but, what PuebloUNIdo and Robg said seemed pretty convincing.
Yeah, and Obama is planning to invade Texas, too.
Spoken like a true industry shill.
That’s “military-industrial complex shill” to you, sir.
9/11 was an inside job and the moon landing was faked. This is why we cant get Unicycle Chat back to the forums.
Government spies are implanted in unicycle chat whose sole purpose is to badmouth the forums so that they can keep the large portion of unicyclists where they can monitor them.
The point is not that the government is watching unicyclists, it is that the government is watching everybody, and breaking its own laws to do so, on a scale that is unprecedented because of the new technologies available and because of the massive economic inequality that has emerged in the US in the last 40 years. Ed Snowden put his life on the line to make this point, and there were others before him. In 2009, a telephone worker named Mark Klein, for example, published a book called “Wiring up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It.”
It is pretty much impossible to avoid this topic if you discuss people’s use of Facebook, but it is sad that Unicyclist.com has lost so much of its vitality. Oh well, SIF hopping isn’t too much different now than it was in 2006…
What I find sad is that when facebook went from university only to schools as well, it actually had some forum thread functionality in groups. It allowed for easy movement of forum users to the new service. As the ‘service’ became more mature, these features were dropped and users told to lump it (after the forums died or became shadows of themselves).
Personally I have never liked it, if you are not paying for a service and there is no obvious way of it making money, you are the product. Now, as the valid user content drops and rampant reposting of clickbait junk rises, we will see what comes next.
On the other hand, a like button would be very useful sometimes when a post or thread doesn’t need a reply and would give us a far better indication on the forums true user base. Modern social media replies are quick (one or two sentences), this post is an essay comparatively. The narrow feed fleshes out short replies and make them look more important than they really are.