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?
Top comments (46)
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 ✨
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.
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? 👀
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.
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?
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.
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....
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
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! ♥️
good.تروكولر جولد
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.
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.
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
Hej @maartengoddijn dat klinkt gezellig!
We recommend checking out @coffeecraftcode's intro to self-host to get a feel for the process and its requirements. That might help you figure out if it's for you, or whether Forem Cloud is a better option.
thank you for this post!
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.
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.• The "Mac for Translators" blog + mailing list thing that I launched 13 years ago
• would love to find a place that's more friendly than blogger + google mail lists.
• I'm not an easily excited person so I'm not sure about this third point but I like dev.to.
• no(t yet)
Very much just a few words! I lived and worked in The Netherlands for a few years, dus ik kan een beetje Nederlands spreken maar niet zo veel.
Happy to see you've started exploring the self-hosting option with Google Cloud! You've been doing a great job asking your questions in the thread, so keep it up! Sending you some encouragement!
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?
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?
Stumbled upon Forem in my quest to move 10k+ developers from Asia out of a Facebook group and boy am I glad to have found y'all!
I have yet to finish reading about Forem and its features but so far, I'm loving it!
So glad you found us, @itschrislow 😁
If you have any questions about how Forem works and how to find your way around this Forem in particular, feel free to reach out to me or any of the rest of the Forem team!
Will do, thanks! I filled up the interest form to operate a Forem, is that still valid or do we just fork the repo and go from there?
If you filled out the form you will be contacted, but of course we won't stop you forking our open source repo!
Hi Forem community!
The next stage of our internet is about togetherness. We're here to echo this need through sports.
Given the changing and social media chokehold on day-to-day activity, most notably amongst sports of all nature, the prosumer (consumers + producers) has entered as the new future of sports fan.
Opposite to the fan-blogger like Bill Simmons, as the producer of the product and actively digesting the same content as the consumer reading it (playing Draftkings, etc.) - the engagement with subscribers or new followers has proven more effective by a prosumer.
We want to build a platform for content creators to own their content, protect their brand and monetize their product. Rewriting the brand-consumer relationship by adding in producers.
VISION: Do to sports media what Netflix did to Hollwood.
What gets us excited about Forem?
Our founders are non-developers so building the MVP has been challenging. We planned on fundraising in order to build it. We built a prototype using dev.to as one of main sources of inspiration.
Little did we know the team at Forem would provide such a perfect opportunity to build!
We're looking to expand our community to those outside of the fantasy sports industry. If anybody would like to learn more about our company please don't hesitate to reach out!
Hey there, I've been thinking about creating a community for a particular group of people for a long time. Used to run one in the 00s, sold it when Facebook came along.
It's a small community of aviation photographers and forem would be part of a platform:
We're looking into several open source solutions and possibly building our own (we're a software development team).
Also interested in helping out with forem dev.
Looking forward to see where this is headed!
Hey, I lives in india and at here there are some exams conducted every year for college addmission. Two major exams are called JEE and NEET but unfortunately there is no platform for them. Even I suffered from this problem. So I want that approx 5 million students can discuss about this exams at one place. So I want to create forum based on forem.