Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Peter Frank
Peter Frank

Posted on

Are you planning on building a community with Forem?

Welcome to Forem.dev!

Are you planning on building a community with Forem? If so, use this thread to discuss with your fellow community builders who are in a similar position.

Some questions to kick-start conversation:

  • Who will your community serve?
  • Does it exist already, or are you starting something new?
  • What gets you excited about building with Forem?
  • Do you have any specific feature requests?

Oldest comments (53)

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designsingh profile image
Preet Singh #5to9Conf

Yes, so looking forward to trying it out! Plan to move our 6000+ designer community out of slack and was looking at Circle.

However, DEVs customized features have me more excited. I like that I can build a standalone native-like community platform using Forem, instead of another "a community on XYZ platform with community switcher".

I haven't explored all features yet to ask for new ones, but as long as you have a good zapper integration, my life as a non developer would be much easier ✨

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I think being open source is going to be the key differentiator between us, circle, and everything in-between.

Every component of Forem is up for scrutiny and open development.

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designsingh profile image
Preet Singh #5to9Conf

Absolutely Ben! That's what has me super excited too! :)

Just to confirm, is the open source version already something I could start building with? πŸ‘€

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sokirill profile image
Kirill So πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬ ✌

Same question, super excited for Forem and have been deciding between Circle as well. However I am a non-dev so not sure how complicated it will get with the setup and maintenance.

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designsingh profile image
Preet Singh #5to9Conf

Absolutely Ben! That's what has me quite excited about Forem!

To confirm, is the open source Forem something I can clone and start building with?

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raquelmsmith profile image
Raquel Smith

Hooray! So excited about using Forem! I want to use it for a product management community. I don't have a community yet, but I'm considering partnering with someone with an existing community to get to kicked off.

I've loved the dev Forem and think it really feels like a community. People use slack for "communities" but it really butchers the intent. I love how purpose-built Forem is!

Specific feature requests: just get it ready for use! β™₯️

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shikoteck profile image
shiko teck
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rabbishuki profile image
Rabbi Shuki Gur

So we have a community of a few hundred Israeli Jewish religious developers, and are looking for a platform that would be a home for the community which is currently communicating via WhatsApp groups.

I am really exited about the option to build on the Forem platform, and looking forward to the translation and RTL challenges that are coming our way.

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danrocha profile image
Daniel da Rocha

I am so giddy about Forem and its future.

Me and my partner-in-crime Maria are building the largest community for architects (as in buildings, not software ;) in Berlin.

We started as a MeetUp group and now we want to take ownership of our platform and make a real home for all our members. We've been slowly building our website (architecturalnetworks.com/berlin and one of the main things we want to have/offer is a DEV.to-style forum, as our CTA is "Exchange Knowledge," of which we think there is just too little in our profession. We believe Forem is the most interesting platform for that, as it fosters not only knowledge exchange but also a sense of community.

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elijahlynn profile image
Elijah Lynn

Super interested in your effort. I have been fantasizing about building an open source community for architects and builders. My mom is an architect and her industry is just so closed. We can have better designs and better structures if architecture was more open! I am checking out your website....

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angelos profile image
Angelos Arnis

Building a community of designers around responsible and holistic design. The community exists and started with a conference we did last year in Helsinki that saw 700 people joining from all over the world. We want to transition our ways of engagement with that community because the conference was only an introduction. A platform where people can really start taking ownership and produce content is the right one and particularly a platform that is open source and accessible to all. So I am so excited to get to do that with Forem

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ildi profile image
Ildi • Edited

Hello from Toronto! Very happy to join the awesome community that is Forem!

I'm the founder and editor of 1vibe.com. We strive to be the front page of hip-hop and would like to grow into a community of curators and music enthusiasts who enjoy discovering/sharing the latest stories in the industry. We launched our new website in April and chose to build it using Wordpress. 1VIBE was inspired by sites like techmeme.com, getpocket.com/explore, redef.com, producthunt.com, and indiehackers.com.

Since April I have learned a lot about content curation and how to run a newsroom with very limited resources. I've been trying to soak up as much as I can about content curation, SEO, topic modeling algorithms, API's, data analytics and anything that can give a newsroom/media company an edge.

When I learned that the application used to build dev.to was going to be open-sourced and I would be able to use it to build my own community, I got really hyped. I'm a big fan of reddit.com/r/hiphopheads but I think subreddits have many limitations and I think a lot can be improved on the experience that they offer. Using Forem, I am confident we can give hip-hop fans a better home.

I grew up spending a lot of time participating in online forums/communities and have owned a few of my own in the past. I love what Forem is doing with many features like the feed, tags, podcasts, and user profiles. I geek out over tools/platforms that do a really good job with organizing and filtering large amount of content. I'm also big on ux/ui and Forem is a pleasure to use and navigate.

A feature that would be cool is the ability to create newsfeeds that pull live content from websites, twitter, and youtube. I'm a huge fan of RSS, it's a shame that it doesn't get more love. A community like 1VIBE for example, would pull all new posts from sites like Vice, Billboard, Genius, Complex etc and present it on a page. It would also be nice if individual users could turn on/off each individual website rss feed, giving them the ability to curate/filter their own newsfeed. I think with a feature like this one, we would no longer need the current 1vibe.com wordpress website and can switch everything to Forem.

Im also a big fan of live chat, push notifications, and newsletters. I'm glad to see that Forem is already building out notifications and email newsletter features. I've always been curious and thought there is a lack of tools/products that help someone embed a community/live chat directly inside a website. Example sidecar.gitter.im. It would be interesting to hear what others think about live chat vs private chat/messaging features. I know that Forem already supports sending msgs between two users who mutually follow each other.

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ildi profile image
Ildi

I just discovered the "Publishing from RSS" feature. Looks like there is already interest in pulling content from individual RSS feeds into Forem. Would be cool to expand further on RSS features such as what I described above.

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volanar profile image
volanar • Edited

Support for YouTube channels and videos is a great way to enrich your community with content. A similar functionality was implemented in the community based on the social engine. I could add thousands of videos from YouTube and other sites socialengine.com/store/product/adv....
For chat, I recommend using integration with the open source app rocket.chat github.com/forem/forem/issues/10420

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brandelune profile image
Jean-Christophe Helary

β€’ The "Mac for Translators" blog + mailing list thing that I launched 13 years ago
β€’ would love to find a place that's more friendly than blogger + google mail lists.
β€’ I'm not an easily excited person so I'm not sure about this third point but I like dev.to.
β€’ no(t yet)

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afrodevgirl profile image
Alexis Moody

Yea! I volunteer for the International Quidditch Association, the international governing body for the sport of quidditch. Our direct constituents are the governing bodies for each country or culturally significant region (i.e Catalonia or Hong Kong). But we directly communicate with and effect the thousands of players, coaches, referees, volunteers, and fans around the world that make this sport so wonderful.

Historically the community has only existed on Facebook groups, and briefly (early on in the sport) a self hosted forum. This is problematic for a variety of reasons, but the main concern is the inability to keep everyone connected in one easy to find platform.

To me, the prospect of rebuilding our community on Forem is imperative to the future of the sport. So yea, I'm pretty excited about the capabilities here.

One thing that is imperative to the adoption of our community is decoupling authentication from Github/Twitter. The main goal is to remove as many barriers of entry to the sport, so requiring social media to join our community is a little counterintuitive to that goal. One thought I had is that we could have an invitation only system, essentially once you register as a member of a national governing body you get a sign up link to community.iqasport.com, otherwise you can register through social media. But the simplest path forward is probably something like okta or one login so more OAuth integrations are possible around the world.

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avalerionv profile image
Dawood Khan Masood

I would love to integrate but the installation process is a nightmare..

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rajeshkumarin profile image
Rajesh Kumar

I am looking for this from last 6+ months. please do intimate us if we can go ahead and setup forem. If You would give us go ahead., We would do so. thanks.

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thegexos profile image
George X.

I'm excited about forem, I'm building a community for hackers, hak.to, I'm currently creating a discord server, with 30 members, I hope to gather more people. For the moment this is the project of one person, but I believe I will find open-minded people to join me on this journey!

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elijahlynn profile image
Elijah Lynn

I am building a community for friends I want to mentor to be open source software engineers and double their salaries. I was going to create a Discord community but then realized they don't even have a native data export feature. And I really wanted to be able to provide public READ access for public search, and Discord doesn't natively support export to make that possible.

Just wanted to share that with you in case you wanted to make your data public as well.

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mcint profile image
Loren McIntyre • Edited

Who will your community serve?

I want to blog (and read blogs of friends), but in a shared space with open/fluid membership. I want to invite people I meet, have friends invite others. The subjects of the forum can be chosen from what emerges.

Does it exist already, or are you starting something new?

We already host chat amongst ourselves, and we budded of from a long-standing university student group providing tech services and hosting for campus students, groups, and a few staff, professors, and research groups. I would like it to be a ~tech focused group of friends. A step below a loomio.org-style cooperative enterprise.

What gets you excited about building with Forem?

The particular style of posts, timeline, and tagging, and the use/behavior of dev.to I've observed so far. It provides a good enough foundation that people can trust it as a repository of knowledge where they write, or seek thoughtful writing. It places medium- to long-form content first.

It's twitter (tags, timeline, follow) but not limited to ~trivial length. It's facebook (timeline, profile, "posts" sizings) but not centered on a person, and a [real name], but instead a valued aspect of identity.

Do you have any specific feature requests?

I have one right now as I'm composing. A select-to-quote in response to posts. e.g. so that I could select your bulleted list, click "quote" and draft a response framed directly around it. Or in general, respond directly to, and engage more deeply with posts.

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adrianresler profile image
Adrian Resler • Edited

Yo!

So I was thinking about the community focused around the CrossFit.

Current pain point from my perspective is that the CrossFit is popular in North America but not so popular in the rest of the world. There are great portals like morningchalkup.com/ that provide great and smart content but they are not enough popular in my opinion in Europe, Asia or South America.

The longterm mission would be to provide a space focused around the CrossFit lifestyle. Where people could discuss and find useful content about mental health, fitness, CrossFit competitions around the world, information about local places where you can train CrossFit, local CrossFit competitions, how to do exercises properly, equipment reviews, tutorials and advices about how to become professional trainer, athlete, CrossFit gym owner or simply a healthier person.

I think that it's a good opportunity since CrossFit has a new CEO Eric Roza (twitter.com/rozaeric?lang=en) and CrossFit goes towards good direction which is about people, community and spreading the healthy life style.

Who will your community serve?

People familiar with crossfit but also people who wants to get familiar and people want to have a healthy lifestyle

Does it exist already, or are you starting something new?

I'm starting something new

What gets you excited about building with Forem?

It gets me exited that I could participate in the open source. I'm a software engineer and I'd love to help if there is a need or possibility

Do you have any specific feature requests?

Nope. I can try to implement somebody else's feature request

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adrianresler profile image
Adrian Resler

Yo!

So I was thinking about the community focused around the CrossFit.

Current pain point from my perspective is that the CrossFit is popular in North America but not so popular in the rest of the world. There are great portals like morningchalkup.com/ that provide great and smart content but they are not enough popular in my opinion in Europe, Asia or South America.

The longterm mission would be to provide a space focused around the CrossFit lifestyle. Where people could discuss and find useful content about mental health, fitness, CrossFit competitions around the world, information about local places where you can train CrossFit, local CrossFit competitions, how to do exercises properly, equipment reviews, tutorials and advices about how to become professional trainer, athlete, CrossFit gym owner or simply a healthier person.

I think that it's a good opportunity since CrossFit has a new CEO Eric Roza (twitter.com/rozaeric?lang=en) and CrossFit goes towards good direction which is about people, community and spreading the healthy life style.

Who will your community serve?

People familiar with crossfit but also people who wants to get familiar and people want to have a healthy lifestyle

Does it exist already, or are you starting something new?

I'm starting something new

What gets you excited about building with Forem?

It gets me exited that I could participate in the open source. I'm a software engineer and I'd love to help if there is a need or possibility

Do you have any specific feature requests?

Nope. I can try to implement somebody else's feature request

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volanar profile image
volanar • Edited

Hi. I suggest that developers create a feature request section where members can vote for the feature with likes and comments