The discussion is about extending the ActivityPub Plugin to bring groups to Discourse, similar to https://a.gup.pe/. Groups can be thought of as directories of users or mailing lists, where the group owner can send messages to all members, and users can subscribe or unsubscribe by following or unfollowing the group. Ric suggests enabling this feature in Discourse to drive engagement from other platforms via the fediverse. Jagster mentions a previous issue with a.gup.pe, while angus expresses interest in adding support for Guppe, but notes an issue with interpreting ActivityPub Follow requests.
Many of the fediverse fans here will be familiar with https://a.gup.pe/ which provides groups to fediverse users. You can think of groups kind of like directories of users or mailing lists. If the group owner sends a message to the list everyone gets that message. Users sub/unsub by simply following or unfollowing the activitypub username/group name. Others in the group can reply to the messages and those get distributed also.
You can also allow anyone in the group to send a message and start a discussion. If we enabled this in Discourse this would allow anyone to start a topic and replies to that topic would show up in the thread.
This could drive a lot of engagement from other platforms on discourse via the fediverse. I think extending the activitypub plugin to enable this group management would be great. Adding extra features such as banning a user from a group to fight spam would also help.
Hey @Ric, thanks for the feature request! I would like to add support for Guppe, however it seems so have an issue with interpreting an appropriately formatted ActivityPub Follow request.