Introducing Discover Hot Topics

[gabriel (Gabriel Grubba)]

If you are not familiar with Discourse Discover, check out this topic.

We recently added a cool, new feature to Discourse Discover: the ability to see recent hot topic discussions across Discourse communities in the subjects that matter to you. It’s a technically simple change but useful for a wide variety of audiences.

How does it work?

For sites included in Discover, we now run a crawler that pulls the latest most active topics, and we use a simple algorithm to group those topics by subject matter. There are Discourse communities about many subjects, and this gives the public a gateway to see what people are talking about in those subjects.

Cool, where can I see this?

This is available now in our iOS mobile app, DiscourseHub, and coming shortly to Android and the website at discover.discourse.com.

You can see a sneak preview in the following video and photos:

Can I use this on my app/website

Yes, certainly. We have built this as a simple API that can be consumed by any client. You need to use these two endpoints:

• https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics-tags.json → returns the subjects/tags to fetch in:
• https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics.json?tag=<name>
  • The tag is required — there’s no “all tags” mode; anything else returns 400
  • you pass a page param to get more results – it is 0-index-based, Defaults to 0, maximum of 5 pages of results.

Example

Start by fetching the available tags:

λ  curl https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics-tags.json
{
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "finance",
    "apple",
    "automation",
    "media",
    "research",
    "smart-home",
    "linux",
    "open-source",
    "webdev",
    "health",
    "gaming",
    "audio",
    "devops",
    "crypto",
    "mapping",
    "technology",
    "support",
    "interests",
    "programming"
  ]
}

Then, pick one. For example, I’ll use ai and then pass it to our second endpoint:

curl "https://discover.discourse.com/hot-topics.json?tag=ai"

Which will respond with something like:

"hot_topics": [
    {
      "id": 431863,
      "title": "Deepseek V4 released",
      "url": "https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/deepseek-v4-released/367696",
      "excerpt": "I think people with 4 DGX Spark are good to go.  Rest of us needs to wait for quantized version.",
      "like_count": 143,
      "reply_count": 76,
      "views": 5891,
      "score": 41.6296558464954,
      "image_url": null,
      "remote_created_at": "2026-04-24T03:21:32.475Z",
      "community_name": "NVIDIA Developer Forums",
      "community_url": "https://forums.developer.nvidia.com",
      "community_logo_url": "https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/discover/original/2X/b/bb908321f62e7dd8c9e87fb8750e242c2e4827d9.png"
    },
    {
      "id": 564616,
      "title": "Webhook URL shows localhost instead of domain (self-hosted n8n)",
      "url": "https://community.n8n.io/t/webhook-url-shows-localhost-instead-of-domain-self-hosted-n8n/292267",
      "excerpt": "Hello, \nI am trying to receive webhook events from Bitrix24 CRM in my self-hosted n8n. \nPreviously it worked on another cloud n8n account, but now on my current hosted instance the Webhook node generates URLs starting with localhost. \nWebhook method is currently set to GET. I also tested POST, but it still does not receive data. \nBecause of that, Bitrix24 does not seem to reach the webhook. \nIs it…",
      "like_count": 13,
      "reply_count": 8,
      "views": 32,
      "score": 41.1415045485148,
      "image_url": null,
      "remote_created_at": "2026-04-28T12:16:38.826Z",
      "community_name": "N8n Community",
      "community_url": "https://community.n8n.io",
      "community_logo_url": "https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/discover/original/2X/d/d34907e298b033e3eb94bcaff8fd8c82b1eb66e7.png"
    },
    // ...

You can then list the topics. The endpoints are updated throughout the day so that each subject has up-to-date results.

[darkpixlz (Pyx)]

Any chance the TestFlight build can be renewed?

an iOS 26 style tab bar would also be a nice addition