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Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

Discourse is a nice experience once you're in, but the lack of federation is problematic. With NNTP, IRC, or even email lists, I can participate in multiple communities from one screen. With Discourse, I need to register on different sites and then visit each of them individually and regularly if I want to actively participate. Consequently, I don't often participate in those communities.

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For authentication, you don't want federation, you want OpenID [0].

The "access each of them individually" problem is separate from federation and could be solved by having custom clients, such that one client connects to multiple discourses, e.g., if Discourse decided to use the Matrix protocol, you could use any Matrix client to connect to any Discourse instance.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

I guess I don't really care what the auth mechanism is, so long as I'm not required to use Google or Facebook. The Mastodon experience is pretty good (not great) in my experience, so I was basing my mental model on that. Really, I'd love to just have NNTP or something similar. I don't want the Slack model where I can't have more than one workplace open at a time. That solves the not needing more than one app problem, but still means switching between communities would have unnecessary friction.

Discourse has added ActivityPub-based support for the Fediverse, using the help of The Pavilion cooperative. First release offers basic support for one-way federating of Categories which federate as Group actors that can be followed by other federated services (e.g. with Mastodon app). Federation comes as a plugin you can install via Discourse admin.

I created a separate HN submission, since not many people are aware of this development. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435680

There is an iOS app I found today called DiscourseHub that allows you to connect multiple discourse sites into a unified homepage, and switch between them. I've used it for about an hour and it seems pretty solid, fwiw

That is a topic already discussed in Discourse Meta, I seconded to use Open ID.

discourse users, admins, devs etc need to get their act together and improve federation possibilities between different instances as it feels like a missed opportunity

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