@CWSmith not right now, no. A category can only follow other accounts that identify themselves as "Group". This is to take advantage of synchronization logic that regular users don't supply (and even then not all groups do either).

However I'll keep this workflow in mind, it's an interesting idea!

I need this too. Ok, my idea is to create an category. Example "Linux". Now i follow some people, example @linuxfoundation@social.lfx.dev And then all Posts will show in my category. Please add this.

@frankm@linux-nerds.org the reason why I'm hesitant about this is because allowing a category to follow a user bakes in the assumption that everything the user posts is relevant.

If you're following something like the linux foundation that's a pretty safe bet for a Linux category, but what if you follow a user and they start sharing or posting about unrelated things, like what they had for breakfast, etc.?

That's where things could get messy.

But, I absolutely love the idea of creating a category and making it sort of like a curated channel based around one idea.

This is the kind of cool stuff I want to see!

@julian@community.nodebb.org

Perhaps as a compromise, you shouldn't follow a user, but instead follow hashtags that match the topic of the category.

@frankm@linux-nerds.org this is now done. Turns out I wasn't actually stopping a category from following a user, so that didn't need rolling back.

Ability for categories to follow regular users · Issue #13232 · NodeBB/NodeBB

This was technically already supported (as in, categories could follow regular user accounts), but it did not work consistently. Specifically, if a user was followed by a category, only the content shared by that user was automatically s...

GitHub (github.com)

@hamiller@forum.wedistribute.org using a hashtag is probably also something I should allow categories to follow, although that's local-only to the instance because of how hashtags work.

Either way I didn't want to restrict a valid use case

@julian I have the same hesitations around having categories follow user accounts. Most users are not categories, and they do not post categorically.

But some are. Satire accounts. Bot accounts. Institutional accounts, as you've called out. These are fairly safe bets, and it would be nice to allow admins the choice to roll the dice.

But another paradigm to explore is lists, and there are a number of ways to represent those. /world could be reconfigured into /feed (stepping on the toes of the Feeds plugin), with users being able to create arbitrary feeds for themselves.

Or lists could be represented as user-created pseudo-categories, given the UX of a forum category, but being personal to the user. They could be presented in /world exclusively, or appended to the bottom of the user's categories list.

Forum-wide lists could be considered, creating global pseudo-categories defined by admins or moderators, with a slightly modified layout and/or visual language.

This is really the transformation of a long standing medium. There's a huge possibility and design space here.