A big thank you, @aschrijver . It’s very clear, and honestly, I almost totally agree with you on everything you said. I wrote my messages with some kind of idea in mind that what you were proposing was a “stepping stone” with “full (and totally open) federation” as the ultimate goal. Now, I’m not even sure where it comes from, and you may even never had said anything like that. It may be a misinterpretation (and invented idea) from myself, or I mixed up things said by other people.
ActivityPub for all it could ALLOW to do, while you can still choose how you want to do things, yes, all this sounds amazing to me. I guess you are right there may be confusion between ActivityPub and Fediverse (you already explained it in the other topic on ActivityPub).
Personally, I do love all the ideas you brought. On the federated “community management”, it could also be very useful to have access to moderators that way. Moderators you could use temporarily when your community is heating up, or when there is for example a special event requiring more moderators (all this was maybe included in “community management” in your mind. You did talk about flags. But you could equally have access to more “admin” type of people, as to “moderators”, or “community managers” if you define these tasks as being different).
As it has been said earlier, all this can be achieved “on the side” through plugins and/or a side site (there could be a “freelance” side site listing and proposing services with people going to work in the community directly. It’s not as nice as having their own platform from where they can manage everything remotely and aggregated thanks to ActivityPub, but it would already be a good start).
It all depends if the Discourse team would want to use some of these ideas to implement them directly in Discourse or not.