@u3acommunities.org @crotchety @jpkatlarge @JohnAaronRose @caww @khleedril @annehole 😀 yep.

We can certainly make good use of community groups and news groups, and anyone on the larger fediverse can "join" them.

So far I belive this is definitely worth doing with friendica, but I think I'll run it on my home server (like the test server) with a backup strategy... so still zero cost.

If we end up with lots of users we can scale up.

I'm actually liking friendica more as I use it more ... probably the biggest issue is writing some introduction up for new users.

@plord12 @michalfita To join a "public restricted" group the process is :

* you follow the group ( eg @ testgroup @ friendica.u3a.social )
* I, owner of the group, gets an notification ... if I'm happy I'll approve the follow (to you join the group)
* You'll then see other posts to the group and can post to it

Friendia supports different account types :

* Personal - one of standard, soapbox or love-all
* Organisation
* News
* Community group - one of public, public restricted and private

So a group is just a special type of account.

You should be able to go to settings -> manage accounts and click on "Register an additional account". The new account can be changed from personal to community group via settings -> Account -> Advanced account types.

You can also click on the "+" icon in the groups which creates the account in a different way,

@u3acommunities.org @crotchety @jpkatlarge @JohnAaronRose @caww @khleedril @annehole I'm really trying to explore how the friendia features might be used.

For example, I thought we could use friendica to mirror u3a structures ... perhaps

* wokingham [ organization ]
* - Science group [ within the wokingham organization ]
* u3acommunities [ organization ]
* - Science group [ within the u3acommunities organization ]

but groups are flat ... you don't seem to be able to create groups within groups. So an account like @ science @ wokingham.u3a.social would be a seperate server.

So for discussion groups, I believe they just need to be unique but with some sort of naming convention, perhaps :

* wokingham science group ( @ science-wokingham @ u3a.social )
* u3acommunities science group ( @ science-u3acommunities @ u3a.social )

Any user could follow these groups to join in (from any server). More specific than hash tags I feel.

Channels could be used to filter groups, so for example the science channel might consist of all science-* groups.

So, given we can only have a flat structure, I'm thinking we probabally need a naming convention.

@u3acommunities.org @crotchety @V96GLF @jpkatlarge @JohnAaronRose @caww @khleedril @Yve_rose1 @annehole I think what we need is -

* Friendica "Community Group" user for any discussion groups
* Friendica "News" user that follows u3a related sources

@u3acommunities.org @crotchety @V96GLF @jpkatlarge @JohnAaronRose @caww @khleedril @Yve_rose1 @annehole I used mention (or @-ing fedi.tips/what-are-mentions-on…) to ensure you got the post.

Yes, hash tags would work, but I'm wondering if groups will be more user friendly.

Thanks