MultiComunity Client App/Feed

Hi!

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 ā€œfeedā€ 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.

1 Like

May I suggest visiting the ā€œtopā€ tab roughly weekly on each community? I find that I donā€™t 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 ā€œgreatest hitsā€ of the community if I havenā€™t visited in 7 days; this is a default Discourse feature.

(And of course Iā€™ll get email notifications if anyone is speaking directly to me on that Discourse instance.)

1 Like

Discourse generates RSS feeds, I subscribe to a bunch. One possibility.

2 Likes

Yes, I agree, thatā€™s fine for each community.

My proposal is when I see this:

I can press something and scroll an integrated feed, with information from all communities at once.

Neither need I, but that doesnā€™t mean it wouldnā€™t 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 .

1 Like

Thanks for the information. I didnā€™t 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.

2 Likes

Yeah, that is the way to go. Maybe try different feeds, like daily top, weekly top, latest to see what address your needs better.

1 Like

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 isnā€™t going to be able to respect that. I use Discourse Hub with eleven communities now, for me at least itā€™s the right mixture of bringing everything into one ā€˜interfaceā€™ whilst maintaining the separation necessary to consume the content the way it was intended.

1 Like

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 isnā€™t marked as read, so Iā€™m not seeing the use case.

Good luck! :sunglasses:

I agree.

What is it that you like compared to just using the discourse app?

I agree.

Its a challenge to make the user aware of been part of several communities at the same time. But not a completely new challenge, for example:

My feed reader makes that kind of effort. So that I am always aware of which publication I am consuming information from.

I guess something like it would be required

2 Likes

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, Iā€™d say. Anyhow, not my cup of tea.

For what itā€™s 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 Iā€™m slow. For all the other knowledge sources I subscribe to a feed. :sunglasses:

@maiki I know what you mean.

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 thereā€™s 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 donā€™t agree, tonight Iā€™ve 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 theyā€™ve been tailored to.

I wasnā€™t aware of this functionality, sounds interesting. Thatā€™s a great UI change. Never found an instance with this. I love kanbans thou.

We use them for task management, workflow state, support scenarios.

Thatā€™s the :sparkles:magic:sparkles: of Discourse. plugin and theme-component can totally change the appearance and behavior. Thereā€™s 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 Iā€™ve come to the realization that not only is Discourse not just topics and posts, itā€™s an entire toolkit thatā€™s versatile in ways I couldnā€™t have conceived seven years ago.

Iā€™m using it in all kinds of projects every day, very rarely just for conversations.

3 Likes