I am wondering how integrating buddypress(wordpress) with GNU Social would work? I am thinking the person administrating the Buddypress community(like an ning comunity site) would essentially own that community, although there could be a variety of ownership structures, and that GNU Users could join buddypress Communities, as many as they want and that they approved(unless open enrollment) for by each Communities admin. Perhaps there could be a drop-down Communities section in the timeline filtering already going on in the left section of GNU social where users could put a check next to which communities notification they want filtering into their timeline. Perhaps the user could respond right from this page with notices that get sent to the appropriate section of the community site they are responding to, or if the user wants to engage in some functionality that is more complex they could click on the community so that that community opens up in a frame within GNU social--perhaps just an icon on the top of the screen that links the user back to their GNU Social timeline is all that is needed to exit the specific community and go back to their GNU timeline. I don't have the technical understanding to know exactly how this would be accomplished but it seems to me the essential idea is to get a Buddypress instance to be a node in the GNU network such that it recognizes approved members of GNU Social as members of their buddypess site. The notifications from each buddypress community site the user is a member of would feed into their notifications on GNU Social.
I hope this makes sense. If this is achievable I think it would create far more value than the sum of GNU social and worpdress/buddypress. Wordpress is open source and powerful and has a massive and growing number of plugins as well as a tremendous amount of human capital behind it. But, we need all this to exist on a distributed layer for reasons that I assume I don't have to enumerate for you all., Also, what buddypress offers is another way for GNU Social to grow--I think affinity communities make a lot of sense because people will feel the more tangible use of them in the earlier stages while the network is growing. Any clarifying questions would be helpful. I My interest is part of a larger plan help facilitate a social movement. The required technology layer does not seem like its quite there yet, but a distributed layer is essential and I'm thankful you all are developing it. Any thoughts? -- Adam Lake 540-585-4444
