@flesh roots :debian: ? If that was the case, and if they kept their eyes on Lemmy and ported changes in Lemmy to Discourse, that'd mean much less trouble. We'd still have the limited functionality, but at least we'd be alerted on our timelines/streams about new threads to look up, all without unnecessary masses of compatibility hackery code. And the Discourse devs wouldn't have to develop everything from scratch.

ActivityPub introducing more specific common standards for groups/forums would help a great deal, too.

I expect Friendica forums to be more compatible with Hubzilla soon (this runs over ActivityPub, too), so the islands may actually be joining.