Do you think the new, unread, top, latest feeds are sufficient as news feeds? If so, are you thinking of then giving people the ability to have feeds that access multiple discourse forums under one umbrella? As that basically is what facebook does.
Looking up a person in discourse gives you their activity, badges, etc. Would you want to see the ability to maintain an activity log that captures activity in multiple discourse forums?
I am kinda allergic to the whole facebook friend concept. Nothing worse in my book than meeting someone at a party and next thing you are asked to be facebook friends. Cue awkward silence. However, there are some people in here I’d like to follow as I learn a lot from them and enjoy their themes and contributions. The way I follow such people is to watch their topic. This is one feature that I wouldn’t mind having – the ability to follow a particular member and get notified when they generate a topic.
Unfortunately it quickly runs away with itself and this is probably the crux as to why it’s not a simple win:
You set up a Discourse forum for you and your mates
Eventually their friends you don’t know want to join
Now you need sub-networks (befriending with privacy) as most will not be comfortable with all posts being public to all on the forum.
These guys think Discourse is cool and recommend it to friends, who also join.
Soon enough you have a scaling challenge.
Paying for all that horsepower will require a funding solution.
No I don’t think that’s enough. The friend collections can be arbitrary and different unpredictable, overlapping sets. I think Facebook newsfeed is a little more complex in that sense … its totally unique to each user.
Interesting. Thinking about that the back-end logistics it would take to achieve your vision is beyond my scope. My first thought after reading your idea is that Discourse seems to offer something different than Facebook – a focus on the topics/subject matter more than the members. It’s more about the information and product offered than the “look at me” posts. I am biased when it comes to Facebook, though, if you can’t tell. I don’t follow people in Facebook, just particular news feeds. The forums I’ve checked out that use Discourse seem to be making use of the more sophisticated moderating tools offered, tend to provide more fact-checked information, and to be focused on niches where the niche more than the people involved is the focus. It seems to me like the public is ripe for this kind of culture with the Facebook fiasco and growing awareness of all the misinformation spread online. But . . . if Discourse is looking to make bucco bucks your line of thinking could be worth exploring.
I like how you think. Whoever solves this question, could find themselves being the next Mark Zuckerberg. There are the tools and structure put in place in the forum itself and then there is the culture that is set up via enforced ground rules and how human interactions are handled which is more subject to the whims of whoever runs a particular forum. What I am hearing from people in my town is they are tired of the bullying and misinformation in Facebook and Nextdoor and want more common sense, fact-checked info and to feel safe when posting. So far as we’ve been thinking how to achieve this (not launched yet ) we’ve focused on ground rules and utilizing different inbuilt moderating tools, themes and plugins to give people the power to self-moderate and be a part of making a better culture in the forum. People also distrust forums as far as sharing their private information. I know 5 people who quit Facebook in the last three days.
I am checking out Mastodon now. So . . . watching the explainer video, one real cool thing they do which discourse doesn’t have yet is being able to follow a member, AND, being able to follow a member across forums (“instances” as they call it). Mastodon and Discourse both permit forums to set up the forum how they want using open source software with each forum having their own rules and culture which you don’t have to nearly the same degree in facebook or nextdoor. Both have “user anti-abuse tools” as Mastodon calls them, but the explainer video doesn’t go into what those tools are. I am hoping someone comes along who has used both Discourse and Mastodon to give us a comprehensive report of their experiences in both.
I mentioned earlier there are definitely people in this forum I’d follow if I could. My way of doing this in a roundabout way is to follow their topics if I catch them coming up in the feed. I also know of some members in this forum who I’d follow in their respective forums if I had that ability to do so as I want to see what they are doing in their projects and am interested in their blog-like topics. Given that there are people self-hosting discourse instances and various hosts for servers for discourse, I don’t know how doable it would be to have a system where you opt into cross-forum feeds.
So is Mastodon a forked version of discourse open-source software? Anyone know?
It seems to me that a big selling point for Mastadon is that you can follow people AND follow people across forums (“instances”) if you watch their explainer video on their home page. A big leap for discourse might be to link discourse forums as wanted with some type of feed. One way would be to follow particular people as Mastadon does or perhaps instead it would be that you follow a topic-type, which fits the ideology of Discourse better (topic-focused more than people-focused).
If the original global username idea from Discourse Hub were reworked to be more federated like Mastodon, maybe watching/following users across Discourse instances would be possible. Of course, this isn’t possible on a local level yet, either…
I don’t follow people in Facebook, just particular news feeds. The forums I’ve checked out that use Discourse seem to be making use of the more sophisticated moderating tools offered, tend to provide more fact-checked information, and to be focused on niches where the niche more than the people involved is the focus. It seems to me like the public is ripe for this kind of culture with the Facebook fiasco and growing awareness of all the misinformation spread online. But . . . if Discourse is looking to make bucco bucks your line of thinking could be worth exploring.
) we’ve focused on ground rules and utilizing different inbuilt moderating tools, themes and plugins to give people the power to self-moderate and be a part of making a better culture in the forum. People also distrust forums as far as sharing their private information. I know 5 people who quit Facebook in the last three days.
