I see a ton of value in making this a feature more widely available.
While it’s possible to subscribe to a user’s RSS activity feed, it’s pretty cumbersome to ask users to use two separate apps (Discourse and an RSS reader) to interact with the community.
Secondly, on private sites, you would need to generate and include api keys for each user to add on to the rss links they want to follow. This is a pain point for staff generating the keys for each user, and it’s confusing to try to teach non-tech savvy users how to use the keys.
Compare these two sets of instructions for users:
- Click a button and you’ll get notified every time this person posts a new topic.
VS - Reach out and request an API key, then download an RSS reader, then go to the user’s activity page, add .rss, append your api key to the link, add that link to your RSS reader. Now, check your RSS reader daily for new posts by the users you’ve added.
Clearly there’s room to make that easier.
This plugin is great for this, but alas it’s only available for self-hosted or enterprise sites.
I’d love to see that plugin be included in Discourse’s official plugins so that standard and business hosted sites can use it. Keeping it as a plugin would still default to your philosophical perspective that on a Discussion platform, users shouldn’t care about who is saying something but rather what is being said. Yet, it would allow any community that DOES see value in letting users follow one another to easily add this feature to their site.