The upcoming possibility of browsing to remote federated categories/communities has me thinking about interesting use cases for it.
Note that Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, and other “community-centric” software already do support this, so it’s nothing new, I’m actually playing catch-up.
One interesting use case centers around NodeBB’s /unread route, which tracks new topics since your last visit. Since ever, and even now in v4, this is only for local categories, but if you’re able to “subscribe” to a remote category, then we could enable use of this page for that content too.
Think about waking up and seeing a self-curated feed of new content from your subscribed communities! There are some interesting parallels to RSS here, too.
What other forum-centric use cases do you think would be enhanced by the ability to browse remote categories?
@Kichae my fear is that adding in the ability for users to customize the forum index would dilute the importance of local categories.
I’m always a big supporter of community building, and while I am very appreciative of the network effects of activitypub, there is the other local community building side that I would want to keep top of mind as well.