"Join" sub-categories & only display posts from "joined" sub-categories in home feed?

Hey Discourse Community,

Feel free to move this question if it’s in the wrong place.

We run men’s groups over at MensGroup.com. Our members are coming to our community to discuss many different self-improvement topics. The default Discourse setting of “all posts from all sub-forums show up on the home feed” isn’t working for our members.

The challenge is that we have a lot of sub-forums that may be triggering or offensive to some of our members. For example we have a Christian group that doesn’t want to see the content from the “gay guys group” and the gay guys don’t want to see the single guys dating group and the old conservative guys don’t want to see posts about psychedelic therapies etc. But with the default Discourse settings, everyone is seeing posts from ALL sub-categories.

Is there a way we can set up Discourse so that:

1. Users can “join” or subscribe to and leave specific sub-categories via a simple “Join” button

2. AND have the home feed ONLY show content from the different sub-categories the users have subscribed to (“joined”)?

That way our members would have a curated home feed that would only show the topics they’re interested in and would keep the upsetting topics out of their experience in the forums.

I searched this discourse forum and found a plugin that allows users to star their favorite categories and only see posts from those categories in their home feed. That would work well but it looks broken.

Is this possible and if so, how?

Thank you so much!

Discourse has two settings that may be helpful for your use case:

  • mute all categories by default, so all categories are muted by default and users should opt-in to the categories they would like to see on their topic lists
  • default categories normal, to set what categories you want to be opted-in by default, so new users don’t end up with an empty home
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