I have some good news for people who are interested in forum federation. The bad news is that it doesn’t immediately apply to this forum (being run on Discourse). The good news is that one of the other main forum softwares NodeBB has been developing full federation with other social networks and just released a new version where it runs out-of-the-box. That means there are now forums where you can make threads about a topic and then make it discoverable for other forums, even micro-blogging services like Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.
Imagine a thread like Apple from Seed - Landrace. If we were federating with a forum like Growing Fruit, that thread could be made discoverable so a member on that forum could pitch in and join the discussion. No more need to have a user for every single forum you want to take part in.
We’re testing out a NodeBB forum in my local data cooperative and it works surprisingly well. We’re self-hosting the forum, because this is part of the service that the coop is made to do. It took 1-2 days to set up and doesn’t seem very data heavy.
I know Going to Seed already migrated from another forum fairly recently and assume this might not be the first priority on future actions. Instead I want to propose to consider the possible benefits of moving to NodeBB in the long run. And possibly finding a self-hosting option (maybe my data coop can help). But even the prices are pretty reasonable: Pricing | Node BB