was just a learning a bit about the activitypub plugin. I don’t see that any of these options are unnatural for discourse, it’s just how externally visible certain posts are.
I actually have now turned off federating replies on the announcements channel (which is the suggested config for an announcements category).
I’ve created a category “Amplify” which is denoted for socially amplified/shared posts about anything NIME related. Posts and replies there are federated.
I’m a bit hesitant to federate the conference category. Many of the posts in conference are actually support requests for things about attending NIME (e.g.) or authoring submissions. I don’t think the authors would necessarily expect the posts to show up on social feeds.
Discourse can also federate tags, so I could setup a “seen-at-nime” tag for discussions which for a thread or discussion during the conference which will end up federated from any category.
edit: follow up, I’ve enabled tags and federated seen-at-nime so if you make a post with that tag, the post and all replies are visible at @seen-at-nime@forum.nime.org