I started working on something along similar lines, here: My plugin that hacks bookmarks into social shares
My basic feeling is that the FB and Twitter “feed” model is sort of the “spreadsheet” or “word processor” of social, for better or for worse. In other words, there is a set of design idioms and expectations that work really well together and that most people have around what doing “social” on the web should look like.
Discourse doesn’t really conform to most of those, which is fine. But there should be a flavor of it that does conform to them to some degree.
With my own quick-and-dirty plugin, what I wanted as a writer was the following:
- A URL like
/u/jonstokesthat people could click on and see the work and content that I want them to see. Not some summary of my user stats, which they probably don’t care about, but actual content from me that I’m curating. - A way to curate and share other people’s content to my “feed.”
Ultimately, though, my goal is the same as the OP’s – to transition people off of FB by giving them something they can get their heads around. Something that they look at and go, “oh, I get what this is. This is not confusing to me. I know all the things about this because I’ve seen it before.”
And in 2018, that means giving them something that looks “social” and feed-based.