First of all I depicted a whole bunch of possiblities without restrictions, as input to the brainstorm. But personally I have two problems I’d like to see improvements in, one as a general community member, and one as community facilitator (staff on currently 5 forums, where I cross-post now and then):
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As community member I have accounts on 15-20 Discourse forums now, juggling accounts (some forgotten) and passwords, and checking popular ones in a carousel-like fashion, site by site. These all happen to have many overlapping content areas, given my interests. Now if you’d ask me to join your great forum on my favourite subject, I’d still be very hesitant to do so and create yet one more account.
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As a community facilitator I have a similar, related, problem. My community may be small, and you may decide to join that other community with content on similar, partially overlapping subjects instead. Or vice versa. Or you may not even know about the existence of that other great community (maybe I as community facilitator know it exists, but would I dedicate a pinned topic to inform my members?).
With the federation support in place there’d be a win-win for community facilitators to cooperate in partnerships and sculpt forum organization for our consecutive audiences and benefit from each other’s strengths. Concretely this would entail:
- Ability to provide higher quality content by selecting most appropriate sources to federate from.
- Larger member base - the aggregate of the federation - and hence more people to have interesting discourse with.
- Higher activity levels in all forum instances participating in the federation, which helps to retain recurring visitors.
Three aspects - quality, quantity and activity - that are key to any successful community 