Here's a late night idea I just had. Hubski could offer private rooms, allowing invited users to share content separate from the global feed. Perhaps the ability to open a private room would be tied to some level of contribution or donation?
So this post has been sitting as a draft for well over a week now and I still have mixed thoughts about it; I'm not sure how I, personally, would use it. I don't think these "subhubs" or whatever you want to call them (I think "private room" is a little more.. distinguished, but also has a bit of innuendo) should be like subreddits; having them become a locus for particular topics of discussion when hubski is about people, not topics, isn't beneficial. Regardless, as the community grows and expands, I wonder if people might appreciate having a more private space to discuss and share among a narrower group of friends.
I think the global community that everyone is thrown into is crucially important to establish the "hubski" ethos, honest open dialogue about issues and events, and to kind of learn who people are, what their interests are, et cetera; fragmentation might be a big downside. However, people are quick to block others for engaging with people they disagree with, so having some spaces separate from "global" might ease those disagreements; perhaps it might also give a space for established members to temporarily retreat to when there are influxes of new members. Lastly, and I think this could be the best upside to a feature, it might allow people to be a little more personal, I know I might be willing to share more with just a small group of people I trust, but less so with the global community.
I think some open questions about how it would work could have a big effect on how people would use the feature: How big is a private room? Three or four versus fifty or more? Are private rooms visible to those outside? Perhaps they are invite only, or something anyone could enter and leave at will? I think it was Kleinbl00 that suggested the possibility of hubski's code being compartmentalized and distributed to other sites as a discussion framework, I would think a feature like this would seem like a natural extension of that.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Boring idea? I had searched last week and couldn't find a similar suggestion, so I apologize in advance if this isn't a very original idea.