Cross post from thread for new developers:
Hi my name is Aaron. I'm the founder of a news organization and crypto project called HEADLINE. We're using artificial intelligence and proof of stake blockchains to create a next-generation unbiased news platform. We have 3500 account holders and growing rapidly. A key project feature will be an integrated social media portal that operates under similar unbiased guidelines. When I discovered Forem I was absolutely blown away by it. It is (IMO) a superior product to Facebook.
I've always believed that a major underlying problem with Facebook is the idea that social media platforms should be infinitely scalable. Niche communities are far more healthy and productive environments, just look at Reddit for example. You can have 10 million people in a subreddit but the quality of interaction is often much greater because members are motivated to enhance discussion not detract from it.
But until now there was no legitimate alternative to the big show. The fact that Forem developers are making it open source is astonishing. If social media life cycles are iterative, then Forem could very well be social media 4.0. Blogspot/Xanga, MySpace, Facebook/Twitter, Forem.
To summarize, I just want to say that I think Forem might be one of the most impressive products, with the most potential that I've ever seen on the internet. Now if only I could spin up a demo without ripping my hair out.
Last night I spent about 8 hours trying with Gitpod, Heroku, and VSCode. What made it even more frustrating is that Dev.To has a one-click spinup for their proprietary version. Would love to see this made available for Forem's third party devs. Here's a few links to the HEADLINE project:
headline.dev
headline.dev/wp-content/uploads/fi...
reddit.com/r/HEADLINECrypto/
algoexplorer.io/asset/137594422
Will keep you guy updated on my progress!
Top comments (8)
Hey @ussaaron , welcome to Forem! Glad you like it, and I have to agree with you on your points about scalability and engagement.
I'm a member of the Forem/DEV team and appreciate your comments about the frustrations of spinning up your own FOSS Forem. @lee and @akhil have successfully completed this process, and I'm sure have valuable insights. @akhil even wrote a series of posts on how to install a FOSS Forem on either your own server or Digital Ocean.
Final point, I'm curious what you mean by
dev.to is the original Forem from which we developed the framework. I'm not aware that we're offering a proprietary version of Forem on DEV... could you direct me to your source for this, please?
Glad you're here and looking forward to updates as your Forem project progresses!
Hey there @ussaaron , in order to make this run on heroku there needs to be a number of environment variables setup by default (which i think are listed in the env file) and a couple of heroku add-ons (fastly and cloudinary) although I am not sure if they are needed now as it was a while ago when I first deployed to Heroku
what are the error messages that you are getting when trying to deploy to heroku?
The errors I was getting were actually related to the free-tier. Forem devs should add a note in the Heroku documentation that the free-tier is not an option for deployment. Not that I have a problem paying for the hosting but looking through all options before locking one in.
Hi @ellativity
So, a few of my statements in my post yesterday were apparently inaccurate. The Dev.To build I was referring to was (I believe) an early iteration of the open source Forem project now. Referring to this article by Ben Halpern:
dev.to/ben/spin-up-a-local-instanc...
Also, the primary issues I experienced yesterday happened for different reasons: On Heroku a paid membership is required to build the app. On Gitpod I was using a deprecated main build. On my local computer I was using Windows not Linux.
So today, I started over building Forem from the ground up with Linux on my local machine. The main issue I ran into on Gitpod after successfully deploying is that you can't set up a user admin with the default local host settings provided.
After I'm able to successfully create the seed admin, I believe I'll be using Gitlab as my primary build location. It has a spectacular set of tools for app development. I'm wary about hosting through Heroku based off reviews I've read of the service. Not ruling it out entirely but looking for alternatives with a more transparent billing mechanism.
Hey @ussaaron .
FOSS setup is known to be frustrating because we haven't "officially" released our FOSS offering with good documentation but are soon.
I worked with our Sys Admins yesterday to work through the documentation needed for the FOSS offering and we are working on making it as comprehensive as we can to help with a lot of these frustrations. Will will have a "soft" launch of the FOSS offering in the near future.
I will say for now we will be supporting Forem FOSS on DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud. I think setting it up on Heroku will continue to be a bit frustrating.
Hi Christina,
Where would you like me to submit bugs/issues? Just about finished spinning up Forem in Linux with Ubuntu on Windows. One big issue I found (with a simple fix) that stalled me for a few hours was the broken [rbenv link for environment build]. 404 on GitHub: Here's the new link and doctor link:
[RBENV INSTALLER]
with curl
curl -fsSL github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/r... | bash
alternatively, with wget
wget -q github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/r... -O- | bash
[RBENV DOCTOR]
with curl
curl -fsSL github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/r... | bash
alternatively, with wget
wget -q github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/r... -O- | bash
Hey! I don't think we are taking bugs quite yet for the FOSS install because the current iteration of Forem FOSS that will be released soon is in a private repo. Once we open that repository along with the docs we will prompt you to add bugs there and other communication around FOSS can continue here.
Hey @ussaaron , I presume you mean there was an issue with the docs for the install?
Did you use this guide?
I can see that this section of has a 404, it's specifically for getting
rbenv-doctorthough as opposed to rbenv itself.This is because the raw url for github has changed the corrected version of the URL is
raw.githubusercontent.com/rbenv/rb...
You can raise and issue here and this is the file that has the incorrect information
EDIT:
I've submitted a pull request to change the URL in the docs
What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)
Description
The URL for rbenv-doctor has changed
Related Tickets & Documents
forem.dev/ussaaron/social-media-4-...
QA Instructions, Screenshots, Recordings
N/A
UI accessibility concerns?
N/A
Added tests?
[optional] Are there any post deployment tasks we need to perform?
N/A
[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?