# Revitalizing the Discourse Hub **URL:** \ **Category:** Site feedback\ **Tags:** discourse-hub\ **Created:** [24 באפריל,‏ 2014,‏ 7:49am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/revitalizing-the-discourse-hub/15029 "2014-04-24T07:49:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 2
**Author:** ![lightyear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@lightyear](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lightyear)\ **Post date:** [24 באפריל,‏ 2014,‏ 8:25am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/revitalizing-the-discourse-hub/15029/2 "2014-04-24T08:25:26Z")
Good that you are revitalizing the discussion and I totally agree with your point about “unique usernames”. I am part of three different forums and have other nicks on all of them for good reasons, if they were forcing me to use a unified nick this would be rather painful. I actually think one of discourse strength is the decentralisation caused by allowing everyone to run their own instance. I am currently thinking whether I want to share many of my settings throughout these forums either. Yes, the profile picture is the same but background picture and whether especially notification settings are different on purpose. **Different discourse, different community, different lightyear** 😉 . However, I **do see the benefit of allowing an easy pull-my-settings-setup feature**. Which could be a key point for people to join other communities, too. I am just a little concerned about keying it to the email-address. **How would you make sure the recipient is trusted to receive the data?** With Gravatar this is of little matter as this is only public profile-data. Which is fine for anyone with access to your email to grab. But for settings and potentially private information I am not sure that is a good idea. Though I was thinking, **it would be pretty damn sweet if discourse itself would offer OAuth-Provider functionality to allow others to authenticate against it**. Essentially allowing that any discourse instance could act as a authentication provider like Twitter or Facebook. The admin could then white-list instances they consider trustworthy ([meta.discourse.org](http://meta.discourse.org) being on it per default of course). Through the OAuth-Channel, a user would create the trusted channel between the two entities (both discourse instances in this case) to sync data in a federated fashion without even requiring a central hub instance nor the email-addresses to match up (which would also fail for me). Though I’d ship the plugin per default with [meta.discourse.org](http://meta.discourse.org) activated allowing for easy login and syncing against at least that instance. * * * A little off-topic, but becoming an OAuth-Provider would also allow better usage/extension through external bots interaction as “people” on the platform or offer other OAuth-enabled apps/features to authenticate against a discourse instance. That’d be amazing. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/revitalizing-the-discourse-hub/15029)._