Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: Welcome thread - v1

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington • Edited

Hey Ashley! πŸ‘‹

That's a great question and I'd be happy to help explain the difference. πŸ™‚

DEV (dev.to) is a community for software developers to write and read articles pertinent to programming. It is built on the community platform called Forem. The DEV team actually created Forem after creating DEV... here's an announcement post for Forem that our founder Ben shared on DEV which explains the whole idea of Forem.

Forem.dev is a community for folks interested in creating their own Forem communities. It's kind of our meta Forem β€” a Forem about Forem. Here's an announcement post for forem.dev that appeared on dev.to. Most of the folks in the forem.dev community are looking for advice on setting up a Forem of their own or they want guidance on managing their Forem community or potentially they have feature ideas to improve the platform that they want to brainstorm with the Forem team.

Note that the DEV (dev.to) team and the Forem team are one in the same! Forem is the company name and the Forem platform is our product. DEV is the largest community running on the Forem platform and we manage this community.

Hope this helps! Of course, let me know if you have any questions. πŸ˜€

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ashe profile image
Ashley Smith

Thank you for your great reply! So I do have a few questions:

  1. I noticed my username was free, is that because they are reserved for github usernames (which matches my username) or because I got lucky?

  2. Lets say I have a meta-question about something on dev.to specifically, should I come here or shall I stay there? (The dev.to 'contact' page forwarded me here, making me think this is the 'discussion' part of dev.to)

  3. Does the style of post vary at all between dev.to and here? This place felt more like a forum than a blog site, yet now that I look closely, both sites do indeed operate identically! Maybe it's just the nature of the content that feels different (questions / blogs) rather than the structure of the site itself.

Thank you for being so accommodating!

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Hey @ashe , again with the great questions! I'm Ella, and I work with Michael on the Forem (and dev.to!) Community Team πŸ‘‹ glad you could join us here.

  1. We don't reserve usernames, but since Forem.dev is a pretty specialist community (for people who are interested in hosting their own Forems), it's small enough that you got in early and scored your choice of username. Which it seems like you did on GitHub too, so I'm about to ask you for some lottery numbers πŸ€

  2. For the most part, a meta question about dev.to will be a question about Forem. We tend to lean towards any question about any Forem being a helpful question for all Forems. Although that's not 100% accurate, there's a good chance that a meta question about dev.to will be informative for Admins of other Forems.

  3. Each Forem is a community in its own right, so content definitely varies between Forems. The software these communities are run on is the same (Forem) but the communities themselves are different. That means the content on dev.to (a developer community) is different to the content on forem.dev (a Forem community), which is different to the content on 1vibe.com (hip hop) or flowstate.to (health and fitness) or joinforest.com (sustainable living).

I hope this helps! And please feel free to keep the questions coming.