I don't like the sound of this. Squishes the pages to mobile smartphone sized and replaces hyperlinks with more data. Are you dead sure that we are not being given the rear end of a donkey by the marketing-people whose job is to make sure that everyone buys more download bandwidth ?
Not all links integrate content with the post, only those supported, as for example a YouTube link becomes an embedded video, and a link to a Discourse post quotes part of the post and conveniently lets you expand the whole post in place.
It doesn’t squish the pages down to phone size on desktop devices. The narrower post size is chosen because it makes content more comfortable to read.
After having used Discourse over at Nu for a while now, I can assure you that it’s not simply marketing this is about (in the case of Discourse, there’s more to the proposal). The design of Discourse improves the experience in discussing and browsing conversations.
Quoting is a massive hassle with Simple Machines Forums, where it’s mostly a breeze in Discourse. You select text in a post and click “quote reply”.
If you accidentally go back a page while composing a post in SMF, you lose your post. At least in Firefox. Safari handles pages differently. Chrome I don’t know.
A thing I love in Discourse is the read tracking so that when you leave a topic and come back, you resume reading at the point you left and need not spend time figuring out where that was. Topics also show how many posts there have been since you last read them, and so on.
Not to be too negative, but I barely even browse these forums because it’s unpleasant and all the rarer manage to bring myself to reply. I increasingly believe the Peercoin community needs these improvements to stay relevant. We already have the solid base Peercoin, so it’s time to bring the rest up to the same level of quality.