I love Discourse, to the point that I select new products to purchase depending on whether they have Discourse or not as their Community Site. Products like, for example, a 3d printer, where you are likely to require community assistance clearly benefit from Discourse.
Now, I have joined tens of communities and I find it difficult to catch up with all.
What I would love is some kind of multi-community feed. Where I can Just scroll down and see in a second all the updates pending in all my communities.
The current mobile app is great but, catching up with my communities is time consuming. In most there are many updates that are not that relevant. The āfeedā pattern, for multiple communities at the same time could be a killer feature that could take on twitter and facebook creating a real alternative where conversations actually happen.
May I suggest visiting the ātopā tab roughly weekly on each community? I find that I donāt need to keep up on every single topic with communities I am only loosely connected to.
Beyond that, the email digest will go out to me summarizing the āgreatest hitsā of the community if I havenāt visited in 7 days; this is a default Discourse feature.
(And of course Iāll get email notifications if anyone is speaking directly to me on that Discourse instance.)
I can press something and scroll an integrated feed, with information from all communities at once.
Neither need I, but that doesnāt mean it wouldnāt be entertaining.
I have reached a point in which I have joined many communities, new features to keep up with them all can be a source of value for discourse, and I think I will end up joining many more .
Thanks for the information. I didnāt know. I might try it to check how the user experience would be, by agregating several community feeds on my newsnblur, another great opensource product.
I am convinced that this would be a killer feature for discourse. Its definitely worth experimenting.
Its something to get started, but I guess it has limitations.
For example discourse will not know what i have read or not, from my rss reader, right @maiki?
I guess it will be a valuable test to see what the user experience is when reading multiple communities at the same time, as most newsreaders offer feed aggregation.
The challenge of aggregation into some discourse-specific tool is that communities do tailor the interface to suit their content. Any standardized mechanism for consumption almost certainly isnāt going to be able to respect that. I use Discourse Hub with eleven communities now, for me at least itās the right mixture of bringing everything into one āinterfaceā whilst maintaining the separation necessary to consume the content the way it was intended.
Others have chimed in sensible advice. When I read your question I think: what do they want? Do you want to read stuff, or do you want badges, or do you want to know all things happening everywhere?
I use a feed reader so I can read a lot in a format I like, in a way I like. It sounds like you want to interface with Discourse so it can mark your read status, but for me most of what I read isnāt marked as read, so Iām not seeing the use case.
I only update my feeds locally (meaning on my laptop, not a server online) when I want to read. I slow. The Discourse app is geared towards folks paying active attention to a bunch of instances, Iād say. Anyhow, not my cup of tea.
For what itās worth, I spend most of my online day in one of five Discourse instances (this here meta being one of them). But not at the same time. I generally only have a single or two tabs open, because Iām slow. For all the other knowledge sources I subscribe to a feed.
I do also a lot of Discourse from the web with focus on one of the communities that I follow, perhaps because there is something going on I am part of.
The proposed feature falls into another category, more like entertainment. Quick review in case thereās something interesting going on, etc. I try to use the client app for that also, but the user experience could match that of twitter or a good feed reader.
I donāt agree, tonight Iāve been on six discourse instances.
One uses Topic List Previews and looks like a social feed, another uses the Kanban component and looks more like Trello than any feed/news reader. Discourse boards can have entirely different personalities, any feed-like view loses half of the functionality theyāve been tailored to.
We use them for task management, workflow state, support scenarios.
Thatās the magic of Discourse. plugin and theme-component can totally change the appearance and behavior. Thereās never going to be a one-size fits-all way to consume that kind of content.
I used to worry that I see every problem as a nail that can be tapped into place with a Discourse-shaped hammer. More recently Iāve come to the realization that not only is Discourse not just topics and posts, itās an entire toolkit thatās versatile in ways I couldnāt have conceived seven years ago.
Iām using it in all kinds of projects every day, very rarely just for conversations.
magic