Related topics:
In particular, since we are already discussing the combination of various platforms, I think hypothesis is HUGE:
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Mmm I’m think you are. 
Discourse = Board (Forum)
Facebook = Different animal
Why are you trying to merge them?
Are not compatibles.
You could make modifications and create addons to forum to have similar “social behavior” that occurs in a social network. But you will never achieve (that) this platform created to be a “forum” behaves like a social network.
Again, two different things.
Just enjoy the best forum experience with Discourse 
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Here are some potential problems with sharing categories/topics across forums. I’ve been thinking of how matador permits people to follow other users across platorms. That actually wouldn’t be as fraught with some of the problems Joffrey outlined above for sharing topics between forums. But then there are concerns for following people, like:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-follow-and-friend-other-users/1584/90?u=mcblu
Discourse has done a brilliant job of moving the culture towards the content (versus people) and it makes for a productive, professional environment. People do follow other people in a professional setting like linked in for example, but in that instance, you join linked in to network with professionals and find jobs. There are clear goals for joining linked in. You usually aren’t joining it to find buddies or develop insulated cliques that exclude other people.
I think a lot of us in here would agree that turning Discourse into facebook culturally and functionally is a horrible idea. But reading this topic has got me thinking about one aspect of Facebook that could be the next step in the evolution of Discourse (and I see this topic of linking forums is nothing new).
Linking across instances of Discourse. Just, wow. It could take the pooled, moderated, fact-checked knowledge up to a whole other level, bigger in scope and an extra draw for people setting up reputable forums or wanting to buy out Discourse for bucco bucks. I am sure there are very good reasons for not linking forums. Discourse staff knows what they are doing and have created something very special here. But, I can’t help but discuss it in here with people who see what I do just cause the idea is so cool.
Here is one of the original discussions on this:
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No need to limit this to discourse forums. Or any forums, for that matter. What tou want is Web Annotations:
Since a year, it’s an official W3C standard. And the people at hypothes.is are working hard to put it into practice. The question is, how well discourse and hypothesis interact with each other. What I would love to see is that discourse at least oneboxes hypothesis annotations and that hypothesis links the post with the oneboxed annotation as a reply to the annotation.
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Awesome explainer video. Ha! I think I clearly have a ‘thing’ for explainer videos.
I think that discourse is going for the same kinda culture as Hypothes.is. So, the video gets me excited for the product but . . . still not clear on how it works. Oops. I will look into it further. If I understand you right, sounds like Hypothes.is in a dream scenario might act as a stand-in for plugins facilitating embedded comments from forums into blogs expanding the scope of that type of embedding functionality.
Surely the solution for notifications across instances is the Discourse app? We can already filter notifications on a per site/category level. The app would do a good job of aggregating notifications across instances, right?
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I find the app very handy, Steve. Would be nice to have it on my desktop, too.
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Not sure what you mean by that. But look who’s on hypothesis’ list of “advisors and collaborators”.
Not sure which of these clipd below does the best job. It probably depends on which aspect ypu’re most interested in. I’m betting on te first one, though:
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Well, for a start iOS should allow web notifications, like Android (& macOS!) already does (and is rumoured to be coming) … but that’s digressing.
What we really need is a server side solution, no?
Why, Chrome and Safari both support notifications natively, what else would a Discourse desktop app add?
It is a digression for sure, I’m not sure how it addresses any of the above. Signing into the iOS app is far more straightforward than logging into each discourse notification and manually accepting browser-based notifications, right?
Whether the goal is central identity and CSO, or just the ability to treat multiple instances as part of a single interface, the idea of having to maintain sessions manually across a handful of sites sounds really unappetizing.
For sure … but I have a huge dislike of apps … sure the Discourse one may be an elegant solution … but the architecture … why do we need such fat clients with so many great open source web app frameworks out there now? If we had had web apps all along, would Windows Phone have survived? Discourse proves, imho, that you don’t need proprietary apps for most things … save perhaps games? But I digress…
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I meant that both platforms are content rather than people focused and naturally condusive to fact checked, crowd sourced information. Thanks for all the info on hypothesis. Very cool. I am playing with it right now.
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What happened to the idea of a Federated Discourse? You can make it so that the admin can add other Discourse to their trusted list, and have their post show up on their forum, and also share membership.
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It’s an idea that we like but … is 
worth of work with 
worth of edge cases to worry about. Not planned at all for now, but someone from the community could whip something up and show us how it can be done.
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Have you considered rubbing some Blockchain on it?
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I hear that’s a good source of funding 
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discoin sounds SO SO good 
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I actually found this forum because I’m on Friendica, and I like it a lot, but I’d love for it to have PRIVATE groups/forums/projects/whatever. I miss facebook groups and I while using facebook groups I miss the good old days of well-moderated forums. Friendica’s public groups work very well, but the private ones aren’t quite private due to other networks in the federation (long story).
It would be brilliant if Discourse and Friendica worked together to allow not only public but also private Discourse topics to show on the Friendica feed, and ideally also allow comments from within the Friendica environment to be posted onto Discourse. Then people would have the choice to enter the forum through Discourse or see the posts through Friendica, so the people who do not care about the social networking part of it, don’t even have to see it. I can imagine each Discourse forum could choose to allow this connection to happen or not.
But, I know very little about coding and I have no clue how difficult or easy this would be. I can imagine both scenarios depending on whether their protocols are even remotely compatible or not.
A potential compromise would be to just allow the posts to be seen within the Friendica feed and to click it to move directly to the appropriate topic on the Discourse forum in order to reply.
I think a plugin that would make this possible would make both Friendica and Discourse more interesting platforms, as they complement each other so well.
EDIT: I noticed Discourse has an option to reply by email and Friendica has an option to communicate to email adresses too, so I think there may be a possible route right there. But then again, I’m not saying it’s EASY, just that I see a possible opening. These things are always more complicated than one would expect.
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You can find the Follow Plugin here.
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