Did you know that the Discover tab has 500+ Discourse communities that you can join?
Did you know you can install Discourse Hub on macOS from the Mac App Store?
Or that you could swipe right on a site to access /chat and /hot directly?
On tablet and desktop, you can now also view Hot Topics for the communities in the app’s Home Screen, a quick and easy way to get a sense of what people are talking about. Besides that, the app also has an improved UX for adding new sites.
Try out the latest release here and let us know what you think!
Whether you’re already an avid user of DiscourseHub, someone who’s only tried it once in the past, or someone who’s never seen it before, we’d love to get your feedback on the latest version.
Please answer the poll below and also reply with any additional feedback.
How would you rate this version of the app overall?
Not what I expected
Looks promising, but I don’t think I’ll become a regular user
Pretty good, I’ll start using this for Discourse
This is great. Hub, where have you been all my life?
0voters
Have you used the DiscourseHub app before this?
I use it all the time
I use it occasionally
I’ve tried it before
No, this is the first time I’ve tried it
0voters
Would you be willing to chat with us about your app experience?
I just installed DiscourseHub and have a few queries. Does the Discover tab show all Discourse communities or only those hosted by Discourse? Also, how does the search functionality for communities work?
Just a suggestion: when a particular community is added, there could be related suggestions based on that.
Thanks for sharing! However, I believe Discourse Discover only shows a list of certain specific communities. On iOS, though, I’m able to find some forums through search that are not listed on Discover.
Or that you could swipe right on a site to access /chat and /hot directly?
I just tried that on Meta in the iOS Discourse Hub 2.0.8 and it didn’t work. Swiping left is the back-button gesture; swiping right is the forward-button gesture.
I switched away from Discourse Hub when iOS PWAs gained notification support. That was the only feature I needed, personally.
I think Discourse Hub is kinda useful for folks who can’t figure out how to install a PWA on iOS, because Apple has made it intentionally difficult. (Share button, scroll down, Add to Home Screen, save.)
I’d never use Discourse Discover. Why would I want to just browse around a bunch of unaffiliated forums?
I could imagine a Reddit-like thing for Discourse threads, such that interesting threads from all around the Discourse universe could appear on a page/tab that I’d look at, but I’m skeptical that I’d even use that. I’d probably just use Reddit, Hacker News, or some similar site. Sites like those sometimes link to Discourse threads, but can also link to any kind of article.
Or doesn’t want to fill screen with plenty of icons when is following more than one forum. Or need easier way to refresh a forum than closing PWA Apple way. Or like to get a links fastest and easiest way.
Note also that it is only going to show a Chat icon for sites that have chat enabled for the user account that is authenticated (so if you aren’t authenticated in the app, there won’t be a chat icon).
I think the Discourse Hub app is actually very good and understand the intention having various Discourse available through the app which is understandable and great for Discourse. Also very generous to have created this and have it available for communities to use.
But for me I prefer not to have a gateway to other communities as the gateway to mine, so unfortunately not something I will use for my community, but I do use it to access Meta Discourse.
I would certainly consider App options, paid or not for Apps that can be published in our own IOS/Android accounts. Discourse obviously is hands down the best at Discourse so any options from them would be exceptional. I have a WordPress Android and IOS App published and seems to work flawlessly for Discourse minus push notifications or an App Icon indicator for notices which is a significant deficiency but it is what it is. I was going to try the OneSignal plugin but that appears to be EOL so guess I’ll leave that out of the picture. Couple of other options for non-PWA apps but while great efforts not really ripe on the vine as far as I can tell.
Realize I’m off topic now so to reel it in, I give the Discourse APP a High Rating and job well done but not something I will use outside of accessing Meta and other “Discourse” communities.
The main sticking point for me is the same one I’ve experienced in the past: Authentication. I updated the app to the latest version and gave it another whirl. I followed a few communities in “Discover”. I then went to “Home” to log into them.
Tried to authenticate Auth0. That failed, albeit I’m not entirely sure if that’s because I tried to use the wrong social login.
Tried to authenticate Hugging face. That succeeded, however the embedded browser then redirected me to the hugging face site. Which is fine I guess, but hardly the optimal experience. I don’t ever really want to use the hugging face site in a virtual browser inside the DiscourseHub app.
Tried to authenticate OpenAI and that failed too.
I know there are various reasons why authentication can fail and it’s partially dependent on the way its implemented on individual forums, however for that very reason I think it’s worth thinking through for the purposes of DiscourseHub (I’m sure others have, I’m just doing this myself too).
Here’s one way it could possibly work a bit better. I’m just thinking this through as I write it, so it’s not going to be airtight, but some version of this might work:
You sign into an account in the app itself tied to an email address (the email is verified in the process).
The Hub registers itself with instances that are followed, i.e. effectively every instance participating on the hub.
The Hub is an “automatically enabled” provider for DiscourseConnect, i.e. with it’s own key or secret that its sends to instances to be used in the auth flow. Obviously this would have to be tightly controlled, however considering Discourse controls the Hub app this seems doable.
The Hub attempts to automatically authenticate the user based on their verified email using the hubs special auto-enabled DiscourseConnect provider status. If the verified email matches an account on the instance, the user is automatically logged in.
You’d want to limit it to authenticating with existing accounts associated with the same email, however that would allow for a fair degree of automatic authentication. In my case at least I would probably be automatically logged in to all the forums in my list.
I appreciate this raises various issues, but considering authentication feels (at least to me) the biggest pain point in using the Hub, something like this seems worth considering (as I suspect it has been?).
Authentication is indeed one of the key parts of Hub and this update did include some authentication improvements, specifically for sites with unusual auth configurations. It doesn’t address everything, though, that is a fair assessment.
We are working on a potential central Discourse login offering that would help with DiscourseHub. It’s something that we’re going to test internally shortly and once adopted, then the Hub can use that as an auth mechanism that would be considerably easier to set up. I can imagine this working very similarly to the 4 points you described.
This failed for me too, and I think you found a bug here with some recent core changes. I’ll open a separate topic for it.
Yeah, this is a configuration issue on the HF side… their authenticator doesn’t return the user to the forum. Happens on the browser as well. But in Hub it is particularly problematic.
It is a good question to consider. I have not used an open source product until recently with Discourse. I guess the concept of a common app to many communities aligns with the open source philosophy. To be honest I think I react in a guarded manner trying to safeguard what I am putting efforts into. Perhaps this is how it must be with commercial products you are paying something for continuously but even still when trying to start a new community there’s an apprehension to offering other options to users who you are attempting to gain as members. Discourse’s PWA makes it easier to think about abandoning Android and iOS altogether and just efficiently offer the PWA to people to easily install. So, I have reservations. I would not have any reservations to buying one if it were made available and installing it myself in the app stores though. Good to think it’s through a bit.
