Discourse being an Open Source application itself and dedicated to Open Standards, it theoretically build on already existing interface specifications, that try to federate conversations accross platforms.
The two leading initiatives in this directions are the
IndieWeb Movement with their approaches of POSSE, PESOS, leveraging Webmentions and so fort, plus even IndieAuth.
As federation is not trivial, I know it from experiments with the Federated Wiki, initiatives like the above will help to find common consensus on how to model distributed conversation graphs. This will likely also include ideas coming from the Open Annotation working group that also works on Hypothes.is.
Further more, as I am interested in aesthetically designing these distributed/federated conversations, the same question has already been raised earlier and could even be used to some weird scenarios as merging two Discourse instances, now that I think of it.
The important part here is to get the content of one site to the other, with possibilities of Forking and Re-Merging, i.e. Pull Requests known from Git(Hub).
One of the noisy results when searching for quotes that I provided delivers another small piece of the puzzle. In the end, the user’s interface itself should facilitate the creation, visualization and maintenance of distributed conversations. This is a task not to be solved by Discourse alone, as mentionned earlier.
Thanks for the reply Sam. I thought this would probably be the case, but thought I’d seen something like this being used before. I must have been getting confused with one boxing.
Can you as the Discourse maintainers imagine to support IndieWeb’s Webmention protocol to notify external sites (Loomio discussions? Blogs?) of links pointing at them.
The conversation graph, as currently shown by in- and outbound links to a topic, could then possibly traverse domains.
I’m taking inspiration here from what Discourse does already, plus GitHub’s style of adding references to a conversation.