Ah, good to hear! Yeah, I guess you’re right about following someone who posts in a forum, but there could be the feature to post to the fediverse and not in a forum. NodeBB for example puts all fedi content outside communities in an “Uncategorized“ category, so if you post there it’s more or less like posting on Mastodon. Mbin also does something similar, they started as a link aggregator and added a “Microblogging“ tab. I understand it’s out of scope for Discourse for the time being, thanks for clarifying that!
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There are crazy people (like me) who want to use Discourse as their primary home in the Fediverse. I want to publish to the Fediverse only via Discourse.
Shouldn’t we support people to use Discourse as their “working in the open” or “something better than a blog” solution?
Since implementing users’ wishes does not pay, did you consider voting for features by money as an option?
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Voting by money is supported. You can fund development after making sure that the new features are pr-welcome
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OTOH that is exactly what Facebook does with groups and contacts and one of the reasons it’s so sticky over there. Because you’re going to connect with your contacts anyway, and this « brings » group/community post into that space.
I could very well imagine something like that being super precious for my community. Communities bring people together and they will want to keep that connection « outside » of the community. If the community tool allows them to bring this additional connection into the same space/app, this avoids an exodus to other social spaces of people who have built strong relationships inside the community.
I know we’re not trying to « replicate Facebook » here but it is worth pondering on why it works so well for certain things.
I’d love to be able to tell my members emigrating from Facebook « see, you can create a fediverse account and connect to people you like off topic ».
Maybe it should be thought of as a way to provide community members with an off topic space which is more « open ».
From my point of view it would make complete sense. The lack of integration between « the socials » (fediverse accounts), blogs (but the connection of those with the fediverse is underway) and communities is what is stopping open tools like mastodon or discourse or Wordpress from being an effective alternative to Facebook.
Well — Mastodon and WordPress already does all of that. Discourse only partly and the direction is mostly outbound, but it isn’t social media platform.