User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-5275700-20160915160434

We've heard a great deal about the specific things communities want from Discussions, adding to what we already learned from beta communities and Community Council. All of this is informing what will come next with regard to future development.

So what is up next? We'll continue to make small changes and updates, of course. The next "bigger" piece of functionality that you'll see will be following — the option to watch specific posts, be notified when there is activity on those posts, and to view a list of the posts you're following.

To calm some of the concern about migration, I want to stress again that we don't have a specific timeline. We'll be making Discussions part of new communities soon, and will begin disabling Forum on communities that have never used it. However, if your community uses Forum currently (or has used it heavily in the past), migration to Discussions will not occur in 2016. Volunteers are welcome of course (we've already had a few). We're looking forward to keeping all of you updated as development continues and working with you through ongoing feedback cycles.