@codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) posted a new topic, subject "Revitalizing the Discourse Hub". It read:

   The original basic idea of the Discourse Hub
    
    > have a reserved @username across all Discourse instances, so when someone sees @username on any Discourse forum, they'll know it is (probably) you!
    
    … seems like kind of a bad idea in retrospect. Why?
    
    Well, if you run your own Discourse, and your name is `@david`, you probably want to be called `@david`, even if some other David reserved the name in Feburary 2013 here on meta. It is **your community** , after all, who are we to tell you that you can't use _your own name_ on your Discourse?
    
    This becomes much, much worse if you're paying us for hosting. Now you have to pay us a monthly fee for your Discourse _and_ you can't be `@david` on your own damn Discourse that _you are paying us for?_
    
    So. Yeah.
    
    But you know what _would_ be useful? If, when you joined a new Discourse forum you've never seen before, all your common settings…
    
      * profile avatar (if custom)
      * profile background
      * long non-unique name
      * short unique @username
      * About Me
      * user preferences
    
    
    
    … were loaded automagically into your new profile right after you registered there?
    
    Now that's something I think the Discourse Hub can and should do.
    
    How would the settings get to the hub? There'd need to be a “publish” button on every Discourse profile that would talk to the hub, and when pressed, transmit all those settings up to the hub, **keyed on your email address**.
    
    So the next time you log in to another Discourse forum with that email address, your settings would already be there waiting for you!
    
    I'm sure there are other things to discuss here like:
    
      * should some settings be private? which settings can go to the hub?
      * does it make sense to key off the email?
      * what if you don't want these settings to automatically populate? (I guess you'd just never push the `Publish User Settings to Discourse Hub` button?)
    
    
    
    Basically:
    
    > Gravatar on Steroids
    
    Which I think was always one of the original design intents of Discourse Hub, but we never quite got that far, or maybe we got distracted by this relatively useless idea of username uniqueness. Personally I blame the Venture Capitalists.

@lightyear (Benjamin Kampmann) replied

    Good that you are revitalizing the discussion and I totally agree with your point about “unique usernames”. I am part of three different forums and have other nicks on all of them for good reasons, if they were forcing me to use a unified nick this would be rather painful. I actually think one of discourse strength is the decentralisation caused by allowing everyone to run their own instance.
    
    I am currently thinking whether I want to share many of my settings throughout these forums either. Yes, the profile picture is the same but background picture and whether especially notification settings are different on purpose. **Different discourse, different community, different lightyear** .
    
    However, I **do see the benefit of allowing an easy pull-my-settings-setup feature**. Which could be a key point for people to join other communities, too. I am just a little concerned about keying it to the email-address. **How would you make sure the recipient is trusted to receive the data?** With Gravatar this is of little matter as this is only public profile-data. Which is fine for anyone with access to your email to grab. But for settings and potentially private information I am not sure that is a good idea.
    
    Though I was thinking, **it would be pretty damn sweet if discourse itself would offer OAuth-Provider functionality to allow others to authenticate against it**. Essentially allowing that any discourse instance could act as a authentication provider like Twitter or Facebook. The admin could then white-list instances they consider trustworthy (meta.discourse.org being on it per default of course). Through the OAuth-Channel, a user would create the trusted channel between the two entities (both discourse instances in this case) to sync data in a federated fashion without even requiring a central hub instance nor the email-addresses to match up (which would also fail for me).
    
    Though I'd ship the plugin per default with meta.discourse.org activated allowing for easy login and syncing against at least that instance.
    
    * * *
    
    A little off-topic, but becoming an OAuth-Provider would also allow better usage/extension through external bots interaction as “people” on the platform or offer other OAuth-enabled apps/features to authenticate against a discourse instance. That'd be amazing.

@codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) replied

    lightyear:
    
    > With Gravatar this is of little matter as this is only public profile-data. Which is fine for anyone with access to your email to grab. But for settings and potentially private information I am not sure that is a good idea.
    
    Almost everything on your profile is public anyway. And what part of your “consider topics new when:” setting choice is a privacy concern, exactly?
    
    lightyear:
    
    > discourse itself would offer OAuth-Provider functionality to allow others to authenticate against it
    
    I have no interest at all in this, having done it at Stack Exchange before. Giant pain in the ass, very little benefit.

@erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen) replied

    lightyear:
    
    > I am currently thinking whether I want to share many of my settings throughout these forums either. Yes, the profile picture is the same but background picture and whether especially notification settings are different on purpose. Different discourse, different community, different lightyear
    
    That's what I'm thinking too. I don't see myself wanting the same notification settings all that often. Doesn't feel like it's worth the overhead. Additional outgoing requests is also always a concern. I've been burned many times before with WordPress' Jetpack.
    
    I see the most value in accumulated stats, more akin to StackExchange. Here's the coolest use case scenario for me:
    
      * Fellow user checks out my profile on jmonkeyengine.org
      * Because I've opted in to Discourse Hub, this user can see that I've got a “Global Account” of some sort.
      * Through this global account, this user can know at a glance what other Discourse communities I'm part of, and where I've been the most active, like meta.discourse.org for instance.
    
    
    
    Heck, this could even grow into an open standard for forums. Let me show people all the Vanilla and VBulletin forums they can find me on as well!

Then @tinkertim (Tim Post) said

    Going by email? I like it. I used Google to sign up for the Ubuntu Discourse, I made a regular account here, and I think I used Twitter somewhere else. This would mean that authentication provider miscreants like me would just have our settings no matter what, provided that whatever service we used was tied to a common email, correct?
    
    If someone is so morbidly curious about how I read things on the Internet that they wanted to find my email, MD5 it, then go look at my settings … I say my _God_ that's creepy but I don't really care.
    
    I doubt that my settings from site to site would vary much, but I could imagine wanting to be able to override certain things on certain sites. I'm sure that would be provided for, as well as some means of opting out of the whole thing.

@larry (Larry Salibra) replied

    codinghorror:
    
    > There'd need to be a “publish” button on every Discourse profile that would talk to the hub, and when pressed, transmit all those settings up to the hub, keyed on your email address.
    
    If you need to push a button, how many people will do it?
    
    Seems like the there are two sets of info: general identity info: bio, avatar, background image, long name, username, website, etc. and discourse specific settings.
    
    We've already got gravatar for avatar. So, if we're going to ask users to push a button to publish, what about pulling identity info from someplace else that's not discourse specific? Like the Namecoin blockchain (ie. OneName)
    
    For those that didn't see it, there was a thread about OneName:  
    https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-onename-namecoin-blockchain-as-global-nickname-registry/140
    
    The thread sort of petered out once @ryanshea hit the new user post limit. But most of the discussion about how to proof who owns which OneName isn't important if it's just being a used as a source of identity details.
    
    And a basic ruby OneName ruby library: https://discuss.bitcoinhk.org/t/initial-release-of-onename-ruby-library/27
    
    It would be a great for discourse to help build an identity ecosystem that's decentralized, distributed and not tied to one company. And it would be something that would be useful beyond just discourse instances.
    
    It would be nice to be able to update my identity info in one place instead of having to do it across dozens of sites and apps!
    
    Centralized or decentralized, this sounds like the right direction for this feature!
    
    codinghorror:
    
    > should some settings be private?
    
    No, it's already public on their user profiles.

Then @codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) said

    erlend_sh:
    
    > Let me show people all the Vanilla and VBulletin forums they can find me on as well!
    
    We technically have that already, but it's of questionable value.
    
    http://www.discourse.org/users/codinghorror
    
    tinkertim:
    
    > they wanted to find my email, MD5 it, then go look at my settings
    
    We could use a much stronger hash than MD5 for sure. And a salt!
    
    larry:
    
    > how many people will do it?
    
    How many people will be a member of more than one Discourse site? Maybe in the far future 10 years from now, a lot! But I doubt that will be common for many years to come… so it's fine for the “Publish” button to be a power user thing for a while.
    
    OneName is interesting, but I need to understand it first. It doesn't pass the “explain it to me like I'm four years old” test at the moment. (Do _not_ describe it in this topic.)

So @Lee_Ars (Lee_Ars) replied

    codinghorror:
    
    > We technically have that already, but it's of questionable value.
    > 
    > http://www.discourse.org/users/codinghorror
    
    When I hit that for my account, I see the gravatar that I'm not using, rather than my custom avatar. (Not a huge big deal, but also not correct.)

To which @erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen) replied

    codinghorror:
    
    > We technically have that already, but it's of questionable value.
    > 
    > http://www.discourse.org/users/codinghorror
    
    Oh, neat. First off though, I know you've been involved with a bunch of other forums (Atom.io for instance), so how come those don't show up? Oh, they're not part of the Hub beta I guess.
    
    Second, and more importantly, it'll never be of much value as long as it's in a hidden profile like that, and not shown on your forum profile here on Meta.

So @codetricity (Craig Oda) replied

    First, I appreciate this opportunity to give feedback from a user's perspective direct to the head of the company.
    
    In my personal use, I would like a central console to see all the posts and unread messages from all the Discourse communities that I am a part of. This could be something like Google Mail where I switch between personal and company emails, but can stay in the same browser tab. Right now, I need to type in the URL for different communities, thus I don't see the updates from some communities as often as I would like. This would be an even bigger need if I were to get clients that used Discourse and had to monitor multiple forums. Currently, I am in three Discourse forums that I want to monitor. One of the forums is not hosted by Discourse.
    
    The second thing I want from a central Discourse Hub is to customize my account. There are two aspects of this:
    
      1. sharing settings similar to how I can share my settings across multiple chrome browsers with my Google account
      2. sharing add-ins across my Discourse communities.
    
    
    
    The concept of a user being able to add a plug-in or extension just for themselves is new. In a browser, this exists. One of the features that I would want a user plugin for is the editor syntax highlighting. In particular, I would want to add a plugin that automatically added in line numbers.
    
    As a user, I would also like to add in a plugin dictionary for Japanese to English language conversion.
    
    I am also interested in tracking user threads instead of just by topic. The reason is that I think some people have more thought-provoking ideas than others. For these people, I would be interested in what they had to say across many different forums. I would like to bookmark people across multiple forums.

To which @hellekin replied

    codinghorror:
    
    > http://www.discourse.org/users/codinghorror
    
    @codinghorror, the links on that page are wrong: they repeat the scheme, e.g., `http://https//meta.discourse.org/users/CodingHorror`
    
    I've read a couple of things on the Hub, but is it active? How to use it?

Then @codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) said

    Definitely not active. We may eventually come back to this but I doubt we will in 2015.

To which @hellekin replied

    Just for the record, when you do, you probably jump on the federation starship.

@AstonJ (AstonJ) replied

    Personally I think you should just ditch the idea altogether.
    
    Whether it is your intention or not, through this, you obtain email addresses of every member on every discourse forum out there (unless the admin opts out). Although we have no reason to distrust you, should Discourse change hands in future the new owners could use the info to start competing sites.
    
    Opting out doesn't fully protect those installs either - it poses a threat to all forums in all niches; even if you have the largest forum in your niche, users of a few hundred other forums in your niche joined together could well prove difficult to compete against.
    
    Sorry to be so negative about this issue - but it is the only thing I have actually disliked about Discourse.

@codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) replied

    No – you would only obtain hashes of the emails, not the actual email.
    
    Remember, this is more like Gravatar on steroids. We could choose a stronger hash like scrypt.

@AstonJ (AstonJ) replied

    That's good Jeff.
    
    The remaining worry would be the potential for change in future. If you think about it from a buyer's perspective, they would almost certainly want to exploit it - simply because there is so much value in large numbers of users.
    
    That's why I suggest ditching it or adding a clause that if the company changes hands it can not be used to harvest users or for any other purpose than to hold common details (so no promos, mailers, etc).

Then @meglio (Anton) said

    I would always prefer to use different avatar, background and “about me” section for every profile on every discourse I actively take part in. Besides that, for other discourse instances where I just “need to log in to post a reply”, I'd like to keep as little info as possible about me. Would be unhappy if all my info was migrated silently from another discourse instance.

So @AstonJ (AstonJ) replied

    As there are no options to turn it off in the admin control panel I don't think the hub is part of Discourse right now.

To which @meglio (Anton) replied

    When I act as a discourse user and not as an admin, it makes no sense for me if admin can turn or or off this feature.
    
    So if there is such a feature, I'd like to be given a chance to opt-out and not import any of my data from the hub.

Then @cregox (caue rego) said

    What's preventing the Hub from happening? Or, rather, what could turn it into a priority?
    
    I doubt any of the customers would _need_ to request this as a feature.
    
    On the other hand, maybe implementing something like this is for the **gravatar** team to be worrying about…

So @dosch (dosch) replied

    Any change this gets revitalized, again?
    
    Still seems like an amazing good idea.

So @erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen) replied

    It's on the “would be really cool to do one day”-list, but that's about it.

@merefield (Robert) replied

    I hear Facebook is in trouble  … bump!

So @erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen) replied

    See my reply above

@downey (Michael Downey) replied

    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.

To which @codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) replied

    Anything is possible, what specifically would you be looking to get done?

Then @erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen) said

    3 posts were split to a new topic: Unique user names in Discourse Hub

@downey (Michael Downey) replied

    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…

@thwright (T. H. Wright) replied

    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.

So @itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma) replied

    Bumping this up to know if there are plans on any roadmap to integrate this?

After which, @awesomerobot (Kris) added

    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).

After which, @tophee (Christoph) added

    awesomerobot:
    
    > Could the hub also be an opt-in public directory of Discourse sites?
    
    There are several ways of interpreting this question:
    
      1. 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?
      2. Isn't the essence of what people are asking for a public directory of discourse sites?
      3. 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.
      4. …
    
    
    
    Which one is it?

After which, @awesomerobot (Kris) added

    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).

Then @hellekin said

    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.

Then @tophee (Christoph) said

    awesomerobot:
    
    > 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
    
    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…

So @erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen) replied

    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.
    
    Element Blog – 27 Sep 21
    
    ### Spaces launch in Element
    
    Spaces rethink grouping rooms and people, fundamentally improving Element and Matrix to better group conversations instead of viewing all rooms all of the time.
    
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28680387
    
    > _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 (Open Metaverse Interoperability Demo Night - YouTube) 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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