Yeah, that’s been brought up Friends list/leaderboard and More social interaction within CityStrides
I’m extremely uncertain about a kind of “open messaging” system. There aren’t really a lot of vectors for harassment in CityStrides (and there are a lot of good moderation tools in this forum software) so I want to be very careful about which features are built out and how they can be used.
I’m leaning towards a ‘friendship’ model over a ‘follower’ model (where both parties would need to confirm/allow that relationship), but since the ‘follower’ model would adhere to the existing privacy rules I think it’s worth considering.
If I added a ‘follower’ model relationship, I’d probably also add the ability to be completely hidden from the site in all possible ways (the current privacy settings don’t hide you from the main Strider list, with a secondary question of whether or not that should even exist in the first place 
).
I’m a bit more inclined to push messaging into this forum software, since it already exists. 
It would be nice to more properly link up the two sites, though - e.g. linking from one to the other. 