That’s what I’m thinking too. I don’t see myself wanting the same notification settings all that often. Doesn’t feel like it’s worth the overhead. Additional outgoing requests is also always a concern. I’ve been burned many times before with WordPress’ Jetpack.
I see the most value in accumulated stats, more akin to StackExchange. Here’s the coolest use case scenario for me:
- Fellow user checks out my profile on jmonkeyengine.org
- Because I’ve opted in to Discourse Hub, this user can see that I’ve got a “Global Account” of some sort.
- Through this global account, this user can know at a glance what other Discourse communities I’m part of, and where I’ve been the most active, like meta.discourse.org for instance.
Heck, this could even grow into an open standard for forums. Let me show people all the Vanilla and VBulletin forums they can find me on as well!