Feel free to let me know if this topic has already been raised multiple times, but as far as I know, there seem to be an out-of-the-box capability in Discourse to follow users. I was wondering whether the restriction of such capabilities is intended to align with evolving regulations, although I would be surprised, since I am still able to follow a user on Bluesky, for example. While researching this quickly, I came across the following potential explanation:
Potential reason : It’s mainly a design and moderation choice, not a technical limitation. On the Ubuntu Community Discourse (and many large public forums), “follow users” is often not enabled for a few reasons:
1) Focus on content, not personalities
Discourse is built around topics and discussions, not social networking.
The goal is: follow the conversation, not the person
So features like “watch topic” are prioritized over “follow user”
2) Privacy and community health
User-following can create:
unwanted attention or “fan/follower” dynamics
potential harassment or targeted tracking of users
pressure on individual contributors (especially in open-source communities)
3) Noise and notification overload
If many people follow active users:
notifications can become very spammy
popular contributors could generate a lot of passive “follower traffic”
4) It’s an optional plugin, not core Discourse
The “follow user” feature exists only via the Discourse Follow plugin, which:
“Follow User”, in my view, is primarily geared to administrative and security purposes, or just watching someone that has been “borderline” in their behaviours on public forums.
Yes, I would like to follow some identified Users, because I respect their level of knowledge, skill or viewpoints.
However, from an administrative point of view, that following task (of one of many Users, for each User logged in) would impose such a huge overhead, compute-wise, as a simple User of the site, for a site such as this with so large a Membership that would need to be scanned, constantly, that I cannot justify imposing such a burden on the site’s compute bandwidth, when I can just keep track of those preferred’s Users profile page as a bookmark on my browser, and review their recent postings there.
Thanks Eric, I understand the concern about the potential overhead, but I don’t think a “Follow User” feature necessarily requires continuously scanning. Most social platforms and forum software implement follow relationships efficiently, so the impact is usually limited to users who have chosen to follow someone.
From my perspective, the main purpose of following users is not administrative or moderation-related. It’s a convenience feature that allows members to keep up with contributors whose posts they find particularly insightful or helpful, without having to manually check profile pages or bookmarks (and thank you for making one with mine.
One thing I found surprising is that the plugin documentation highlights potential regulatory implications for forums. I hadn’t considered that enabling user-following features could affect a forum’s legal or compliance obligations: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-follow/110579
Let’s wait for the canonical team to get back to us on this.
If the issue is related to this only, a simple solution would be for Canonical to request an upgrade from the Discourse CSM for the officially supported plugin to include a geo-mapping backend, so that the feature can be enabled only for users in specific countries and excluded from those where it could be problematic. I like to live in a world full of solutions
While the notion of following users might sound interesting, it does not align with Meta Discourse’s core principles.
The Discourse software was designed and built to be a topic-centered discussion platform, not a person-centered social network.
There is an optional, official, plugin called Discourse Follow that allows users to follow other users, see a feed of their posts, and receive notifications.
However, this is not part of core Discourse and is very unlikely to be added at any point in the future here.
I, personally, would also be against it.
What you might consider doing is following user activity via their RSS feed. Not ideal, but might be one way of doing it.
Thank you very much for the information @rubi1200 - As a big RSS fan, I’m glad to have discovered this. So to summarize, I can create a large RSS automation on the side but will not most probably ever have the ability to do the same on the front-end of discourse
