Any change this gets revitalized, again?
Still seems like an amazing good idea.
It’s on the “would be really cool to do one day”-list, but that’s about it.
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I hear Facebook is in trouble 
… bump!
See my reply above
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Not that I have any to give out right at the moment … but if benevolent entity (individual, organization) had funding to work on these types of ideas – might it be something the Discourse team might be interested in endorsing, working on, and/or outsourcing to trusted partners?
Just to be “on the record” about it. Hypothetically, of course. 
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Anything is possible, what specifically would you be looking to get done?
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3 posts were split to a new topic: Unique user names in Discourse Hub
I imagine folks would need to more fully develop some feature ideas before there would likely be much chance for funding. But the topic is underway…
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I thought I’d share some thoughts (for which I am without the time or ability to back it up with the coding know-how, just some sysadmin experience).
Would some sort of username involving a hidden or shown ID number say (@user#IDnumber) be a way to implement this?
The obvious problem would be if you have 100,000 davids, how do you know which one you need besides memorizing their ID #, too?
You could have some kind of info loaded with the Name and ID (e.g. domain name) but who wants to scroll through that list to find who they want?
The ID number could be employed only at the hub then, so multiple users can be David, but have a hidden ID (revealed on hovering), and local containers would have their local david.
Or, you allow a local instance user to sync with a hub user, thus the hub has you hooked in as davidthemechanic and functions as a login option (login locally or login via the hub, via oauth or so), but your own site has you setup as david.
Possibly in the same vein: A user could have some sort of friend list at the hub, almost like a forum contact/address book, which could be referenced from their account on their local container or whichever site they are visiting. So when that user references david, they get the david they want, or at least a condensed list of davids.
A user could have some ability to add tags or notes and when making a mention would then be able to find the one david they want quicker. Thus if you have 15 davids in your contact list and you want your mechanic, you begin typing @ followed by David and see quick info tags, thus being able to determine if david is a mechanic, from here at meta, that guy who PM’d you the other day, or some guy you enjoyed talking with and getting to know.
So, to summarize:
Allow the same username, but assign a short but unique ID number that can be hidden in some context
A friend list at the hub with some sort of tagging/noting ability that can be referenced in a local discourse container
Allow a local username that attaches to a hub account from the user account or at sign up, thus enabling one discourse hub login but being able to display your discourse name on different forums.
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Bumping this up to know if there are plans on any roadmap to integrate this?
Could the hub also be an opt-in public directory of Discourse sites? This could partially answer “what’s in it for me” for a site admin.
Would it ever be able to aggregate content across Discourse instances? For example, could my Hub profile page show me all the posts I’ve made on different sites? Centralized notifications?
Disqus does something similar, for example https://disqus.com/by/elevatedliving/. Really a lot of what Disqus does there makes more sense for communities rather than what’s primarily a commenting system… (turns out they also have communities, e.g. Disqus Channel - Star Wars).
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There are several ways of interpreting this question:
- Since the hub idea is nice but not at all on our timeline in the foreseeable future, would at least some of you relentless hub-enthusiasts be happy do at least have a public directory of discourse sites?
- Isn’t the essence of what people are asking for a public directory of discourse sites?
- We are thinking about how we can realistically add the hub somewhere on our long-range planning and so we’re wondering whether a directory of public sites could be a first step in this long journey.
- …
Which one is it? 
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It was just a passing thought, a lot of what’s been talked about has been user-focused (which is great) — I was just wondering if a public directory would add incentive for admins to have their site participate in a hub, and if in general anyone would find it useful.
So I guess if you had a place to manage your identity across multiple Discourse sites, would you see any value in being able to search for other Discourse sites from that hub? Or do you not care, and just want to find the best community for any particular topic, regardless of which platform it uses (so you’d rather just do a general web search instead).
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Thinking of the trust levels system for users, I would extrapolate to identify friendly communities, maybe based on the overlap of users and cross-linking between them. I can’t find an example of bad-behaving communities (and please, don’t tell me any) but I guess a hub would be able to correlate like-minded communities…
In some future, when one email would enable users to connect to many Discourse instances, the hub might also become a way to keep a public user profile that a newly joined community would tap into to create the user’s profile without bothering her. In some cases though, users might want to keep their accounts and participation separate, as in work/home dichotomy, and this should also be supported. But maybe this goes way beyond what a simple hub would mean.
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Maybe it’s just me, but if a forum is using discourse, it’s a reason for me to sign up. Not the only reason of course, but a relevant one. So, yes, for me it would make sense to have a hub where I could check if a discourse forum on the topic in question exists.If it does, I’d certainly check it out first. If it isn’t what I’m looking for, I’d do a general search.
But that said, this wouldn’t be the most important reason for a discourse hub. Not sure if I’m stretching the hub idea to far, but I’d love to be able to quote between discourse instances…
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As the Matrix protocol gets more mature, it’s got a lot of properties that we should look to replicate with a more centralized (but still open source and without lock-in) approach in Discourse Hub.
Arathorn (Element lead dev) said:
For what it’s worth, the thing I find really exciting about Spaces is that they provide a way to create a decentralised global hierarchical directory structure for realtime data. It’s like a free-for-all global USENET hierarchy that anyone can curate or contribute to, complete with decentralised ACLs. Or like DMOZ but for chatrooms. We haven’t published a “root” space as Matrix.org yet (as the “subspace” hierarchy feature is still in beta), but I cannot wait to kill off the public room directory for Matrix.org (which is a total tirefire atm) and replace it with decentralised hierarchies of rooms that the community can moderate and curate like any other content.
Add in voice/video rooms, async comms (messageboards, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups), decentralised metaverse worlds like thirdroom (https://youtu.be/e26UJRCGfGk?t=2263) and then you end up with a skeleton for a whole open universe of interoperable communication.
Next up: decentralised search for discovery as well as decentralised hierarchies…
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