@Chris Trottier I expect this to introduce yet another forum/group standard to the Fediverse in addition to the several incompatible standards we already have.

#Guppe has its own standard which is created around #Mastodon and Mastodon only.
#Friendica has its own standard.
#Hubzilla and #Streams have their own common standard.
#Lemmy has its own standard.

And now #Discourse will most likely create an entirely new ActivityPub-based forum standard from scratch, disregarding any compatibility to the projects mentioned above. I wouldn't be surprised if the Discourse devs didn't know there's more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon, that there are already forum standards. Either that, or they know, and they can't decide which one to adhere to, so they make a new one from scratch. Or they simply can't make Discourse compatible to any one existing standard, and they're forced to make a new one.

Just to illustrate the problem: Hubzilla is technically a fork of Friendica. Both have forums which are nothing but regular accounts/channels with special rights settings. But Hubzilla's backend was largely rewritten, and internally, Hubzilla uses an entirely different protocol than Friendica. Before #ActivityPub came around, Friendica and Hubzilla used the #Diaspora protocol to federate, so much different are they.

@Fediverse News is a forum on Friendica. Hubzilla, however, doesn't recognise threads from Fediverse News as such. Each post shows up separately as an individual, stand-alone post on my stream, cluttering it. I have to look up the sources (which almost always lead me to Mastodon) to be able to see them in threads.