I’ve tested the discourse plugin before. It’s focused on mastodon and doesn’t work well with lemmy. You can pull the comm, but new posts won’t sync automatically.

Following from Mbin also seems fine, for any Mbinauts or whatever we’re called. Like following any other new community, your instance will only receive updates going forward, not the backdated posts, so I can’t speak for how well it works until there’s some new news.

It’s neat to see more services like this come into the ActivityPub fold. Obviously some stuff doesn’t work great together, like interacting with Lemmy from Mastodon, but forum-based stuff like Discourse could integrate really nicely with the threadiverse. Excited to see how this goes.

EDIT: Well, there have been some new news posts since I made this comment and they have not federated to Mbin as either threads or microblog posts, so I’d say that right now, following Discourse forums with ActivityPub support is essentially non-functional.

Given the other comments in this thread, PrivacyGuides is perhaps not the forum you most want to subscribe to anyway. Regardless, Discourse as a software still seems like it should interact well with the threadiverse, but currently it does not.

EDIT2: OK, I see why it doesn’t work well with Mbin (and Lemmy as well). For ActivityPub purposes, whether by design or by configuration, topics posted to the forum are treated as posts by the original topic creator, boosted by the community.

However, Mbin magazines/Lemmy communities don’t have boosting as a concept, there’s simply no interface for a community to boost another post, so there’s no way to see what the PrivacyGuides news community has boosted, i.e. the things that have been posted to the forum.

FYI PrivacyGuides is operated by a CSAM-friendly entity, they completely ignore abuse reports about CSAM hosted on their platforms.

I can only recommend everyone to defed from them.