I'd love to let you in on the next step of what I hope will be all of our collective journey together.
Nearly two years ago, DEV went open source. It was a big step for a nascent organization and a decision based on the observation that the more we empowered our wonderful community to be a part of the journey, the better things turned out. However, what we open sourced that day was just the first step of a bigger idea. Our aspiration has always been to offer up our community platform for others to use as well.
Over the last few years, we’ve honed our values and principles, and have strengthened our resolve that while we want to support a healthy ecosystem, we do not want to unilaterally become the ecosystem. We don’t want to just power community software, we want to empower community. That means we want to own a meaningful, but relatively small, part of a bigger idea. And with that introduction, I want to describe the next part of our open source evolution.
Our platform — the one that powers DEV — is built for empowering community, and it's called Forem.
What is Forem?
Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective. Being part of a community serves so many different purposes depending on context, and we hope the idea of what constitutes a community will expand as creators like you get creating.
Each Forem will live online as its own independent web application with its own standalone databases, authentication mechanisms, configuration, dedicated URL, etc. Alongside this independence, our vision is for Forems to be highly compatible with one another in order to build a cohesive ecosystem where members of multiple Forems can move seamlessly between community apps — even if those apps do not share any data about the individual.
This is where ideals around privacy, inclusion, and an open and equal web need to meet with a passion for product development and excellence in user experience — we expect we are only at the beginning of this journey. We don't intend to build niche open source software that only appeals to a technical crowd; we resolve, along with you, to build universally accessible, delightful, and enriching software for everyone.
A new day one
We're not here to immediately bestow perfect software on the world, we're here to bring you along on a shared journey. A journey to unbundle the power dynamic of social networks, to take some old ideas about the web and make them new again, to heighten the focus on protecting our society's most vulnerable, and to empower a diversity of cultures and ideas.
We have a never-ending list of issues, both technical and organizational, to address along the way, and we hope there will be enough ideological and technical buy-in from the community to effectively step from today to tomorrow in terms of our capacity to serve the mission.
What does Forem do?
A fresh Forem comes equipped with basically all the features of DEV:
Join the community, fill out your profile, write posts, read posts, leave comments, react to posts and comments, follow users, follow tags, search the site, receive notifications, create classified listings, listen to podcasts, embed rich content, ingest an RSS feed, report users, block users, become moderators, moderate, send direct messages, participate in group chats, receive achievement badges, configure fonts and themes, export your data, and the list goes on and on depending on what you'd consider a "feature".
If you're reading that list and saying to yourself "holy cow that's a lot", I can assure you that I felt the same way writing it. We have methodically built certain important features while also rushing some things and throwing some things at the wall to see if they stick. That's the nature of building a software project, a community, and a company all at the same time.
As an organization and open source community that works in a distributed, asynchronous style, it's only natural to be somewhat sprawling. But as we take on a big new challenge, it will be important for us to hone in on the kernel of the value and to architect software which serves the community in the most elegant possible way. I am really excited about what that will look like.
If DEV is the first Forem, ThisMMALife is the second. Community member Lee Wynne was the first to take our early indications that this was in the pipeline and to go through a lot of pain to stand up their own community instance. Lee has been a tremendous partner in helping lead the way. You might say the third community is community.benhalpern.com, and there are a few other prototypes and WIP projects in the ether.
We are not yet ready
This is important to say: While I'm glad we're finally putting a name to this next phase of the journey, and reiterating what’s on the horizon, we're still not quite ready for your community.... Getting to “ready” will be a gradual process. As we work out the details of how hosting, deployment, versioning, and compatibility will work, we will initially only support public instances that we host. It's the only practical way to get these spun up effectively right now, and we're not even 100% ready for that... but we're getting closer every single day.
To that end, we want to hear from you if you’re interested in the idea of spinning up a community. It can be for a passion project, a new commercial venture, as an extension to your existing business, or any other reason between and beyond. If that’s you, please get in touch with us by filling out this form. No commitment necessary, just tell us what you’re thinking about building.
Join us as we build
If you are looking to contribute to the software side of things, we have plenty of open issues, but we also ask that you be patient with us as we continuously relearn what it means to manage the code contributions as our platform evolves. As much as we are excited by contributions from folks building with a personal stake in this game, we’ll need to learn together how best to handle this all.
Our repo is still entitled dev.to
but we will be migrating to forem
soon, as that is the name of the software itself — dev.to is simply an instance (albeit an important one).
Some of the first Forems we launch will be meta-forems designed to help facilitate the software development process as well as the administration, moderation and promotion of individual communities.
A taste of the Forem ecosystem
If each Forem is its own web application with its own configuration and plugins, we foresee bridge apps within the ecosystem that help tie things together. Native wrappers, specialized browsers, extensions, etc.
For example, I have been running this browser extension locally as a proof of concept, and I have been pleased with the user experience, especially how it works with the service-worker-driven approach of how our pages are rendered. Speed moving between apps is almost as speedy as changing pages within an app.
We have also been conceiving of the experience for a community creator setting up a new Forem. Here is a taste of what to expect from our most recent design critique...
For Empowering Community
It’s a privilege to work on software with purpose — If we get this right over the next few years it will have a really special impact on a lot of lives.
If you’re interested in joining us by building a community of your very own, let us know by filling out this form. Please keep up with our open source project and contribute if you care to. And keep an eye out for entrepreneurial opportunities within the Forem ecosystem.
Happy coding 🌱
Oldest comments (106)
I grew up spending a lot of time in independent online communities hosted on vBulletin, phpBB, and other forum software. I went to some communities for entertainment, others to learn entrepreneurial and technical skills, and some just for a sense of belonging. I could find my place in these dynamic and culturally rich online spaces.
These communities have largely faded away over the last decade or so, as larger platforms offered a more modern consumer experience (that they're eager to offer in exchange for user data).
Many of the new communities being started these days are forced to build directly on the backs of these giants. They exist as a Group or a sub-space, but they lack the same character and sense of community of their earlier-internet ancestors.
I hope that Forem is able to level the playing field. That now community leaders of all have backgrounds and perspectives are able to build a space that is modern, safe, and independent. That community members can enjoy an engaging and delightful experience, while also knowing that their privacy and safety is being protected.
It's a very big task and it will be a long journey, but I can think of few challenges more worthwhile than working to build software for empowering community.
Exactly! It seems exciting that we get to work on us returning to the way that online communities used to be without the profitizing of people's data.
I've seen a number of small communities crop up lately outside of the major social media bubble. Many are Mastodon instances, but a few are old-style forums.
It's hard to run a community. Really hard. You have to have a mix of technical knowledge, social clout, and pure energy. It's that that is the blocker for creating ecosystems outside of major social media, not the software.
This is very true. Community building is a very special skill, but there's a lot of help an ecosystem can provide. The success of popular Facebook groups, subreddits, etc. is not entirely dependent on the generating buzz and banking on social clout, there's a discovery mechanism and network affect of the platform. Same applies to Slack and Discord.
Just like the web itself is buoyed by browsers and search engines and the native ecosystem runs through app stores etc. there's a lot the ecosystem can do to empower builders. Our hope is that we can provide ecosystem mechanics without necessitating that the ecosystem entirely runs through us.
Our learnings from DEV have shaped and help us understand exactly what we’re working towards with Forem. Thank you all for being part of the community, and continuing to build alongside us in the open. We hope you’re as excited about Forem as we are.
Like Ben mentioned, if you’re a community leader with ideals around privacy, inclusion, and an open and equal web, please don’t hesitate to reach out through this form. We’d love to hear from you. ❤️
I'm really excited about this. As someone who started out as a DEV community member years ago who now helps build the platform itself, the technical challenges of extracting and constructing software that works for everyone is really thrilling. I love the idea of taking the great foundation of DEV and extracting it into something that is a delightful experience for any—and maybe one day, every—user of the web who is on the search for a community where they feel like they truly belong. 💖
that is such a great mission! Specially now, I think being a part of a community, whether it is to share your thoughts on a particular book, music taste or simply software stuff 😄. It helps someone to fit in and brings happiness to their lives, at least that's how I feel about it.
If you're interested in reading some past posts along the way that got us to this point.
dev.to is now open source
Ben Halpern ・ Aug 8 '18 ・ 4 min read
Medium Was Never Meant to Be a Part of the Developer Ecosystem
Ben Halpern ・ Jun 3 '19 ・ 5 min read
Project Benatar: Fending Off Data Black Holes
Ben Halpern ・ Jun 17 '19 ・ 6 min read
DEV Went Open Source One Year Ago Today, And We Have So Much More Planned!
Ben Halpern ・ Aug 8 '19 ・ 4 min read
The Future of DEV
Ben Halpern ・ Nov 4 '19 ・ 4 min read
And the first post musing on the potential value of open source in this space. This dates back to before we even decided to shift to open source. The enthusiastic response was definitely catalyst for continuing down this path.
How dev.to could topple Facebook
Ben Halpern ・ Mar 22 '18 ・ 5 min read
One major reason why I enjoy working for DEV so much is the company's commitment to transparency, integrity, authenticity and community. I cannot describe how EXCITED I am for Forem! I believe it will be a major game-changer in the online-communities space.
I totally feel the same way — I feel so lucky to be working here.
Ok y'all are making ME want to work there! Sounds like an awesome place!
Great vision!
My favorite parts of the internet are niche and fueled by passion. Over the last decade, I've seen those corners of the web shrink and become inaccessible. For me building a toolkit to revive independent hobbyist and niche communities is a dream true. I think the internet is (was?) about the free exchange of ideas and empowering individuals. A shift away from centralized content production and curation is overdue if you ask me. :)
It might be more important, though, that Forem is providing an alternative path to the terrifying model of surveillance capitalism. I hope we're able to empower communities, but especially alternative methods of making viable businesses around those communities that don't violate the privacy and rights of their participants. Instead of exploitation, those new businesses and communities can take advantage of the ethos baked into Forem to empower their users.
It also doesn't hurt that I'm pumped to build an open source project and make a bunch of new developer friends along the way. :D
Yes 👏🏼
Very specific to my role here at DEV, but I'm super siked about developing a community platform that really gets moderation and user safety right. We're lucky that DEV draws in so many kind, inclusive folks — an excellent recipe for a healthy community — but of course we also regularly combat spam and conduct-breaking behavior. We're always working to better our tooling and reshaping processes here on dev.to to make us more efficient and effective at this, and I'm excited to link up with Forem community managers to continue this process and bounce ideas off folks with fresh eyes.
Is forem open source? I didn't see. You have to apply to make one?
Forem is open source via our code...
thepracticaldev / dev.to
Where programmers share ideas and help each other grow
DEV Community👩💻 👨💻
The Human Layer of the StackWelcome to the dev.to codebase. We are so excited to have you With your help, we can build out DEV to be more stable and better serve our community.
What is dev.to?
dev.to (or just DEV) is a platform where software developers write articles, take part in discussions, and build their professional profiles We value supportive and constructive dialogue in the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place within our community.❤️
Table of Contents
Contributing
We encourage you to contribute to dev.to! Please check out the Contributing to dev.to guide for guidelines about how to proceed.
Getting Started
This section provides…
We only ask that folks apply to get in our funnel of support while things are still early and changing very quickly. Nothing is stopping folks from going it on their own, but the most successful, secure outlook is doing it with our involvement early on.
Very cool! 🔥 I remember being part of the IPB / vBulletin / phpBB days, all the way through Vanilla. It seems like everyone just has a Slack/Discord now, or maybe a Spectrum -- but regardless of the platform, none really achieve the success and accessibility that message boards have. Looking forward to see this platform evolve and become a standard for publication-based communities. Could easily see this being used by artists (like a DeviantArt of sorts), writing groups, lots of potential.
Yup! And not to say we've cracked the nut... Our own feeds and algorithms still need a lot of ongoing UX improvements, but asynchronous, sprawling discussions are pretty important for the web. We're trying to bring modern expectations to good ideas of old.
Yes!!! I learned how to code because I was part of an online writing group and I wanted to learn how to customize my profile better. That grew into developing plugins for the forum software, theming, etc. This announcement brings back a lot of nostalgia for me and I'm really excited to see what the Forem ecosystem ends up looking like with the Dev team leading the way.
What would you say are the major differences, both conceptually and technologically, between Forem, Discourse, and any other similar-ish forum-type software?
A big difference for us is that we're trying to provide an experience which borrows from evolving expectations of social media that keep folks coming back, and make it easier to engage with the content and discussions without having to always be engaged.
The traditional forum is still valuable, but we feel like the way folks engage, make friends, and go deeper with the newer paradigms of social media are worth trying to capture in a way to build a constructive community that scales up well.
Technically I think a big difference is that this style of social media does more work for you to surface the right parts of the conversation. Separating signal from noise, as it were.
I think where the big players go horribly wrong is doing so with a total black box. Transparency in developing this kind of software is a huge deal.
I feel like I hit the Jackpot being the Lead SRE for DEV at a time like this while we roll out this new project. Not only do I get to instill good SRE practices for our DEV community, but I get the challenge of reproducing it so that it applies to many different communities.
We all know that creating a single software application is challenging. Creating one that can be reproduced with a click of a button hundreds of times, even more so. I look forward to tackling that challenge and coming up with new and innovative solutions along the way. I think it's safe to say once our world opens back up and conferences resume there will be plenty of new talk material coming from this girl 😉
Y’all this is absolutely amazing and it makes me feel so proud to be a part of this community. ❤️
I’m very excited to watch this develop and hopefully help by being an open source contributor. Good luck!
Thanks for your support and being part of the journey :)
It's been really neat to see this project grow and unfold. It was also really amazing how each DEV team member, even the much, much less technical ones like me, were given the opportunity to really collaborate on what this thing would look like, and not just from an aesthetics and functionality level, but from a values and ethics standpoint. I couldn't be more proud of the DEV team, and am excited to see what communities y'all build in the future. Hit me up if you make anything related to banjos, podcasts, art/sculpture, biking, or cocktails 😊
Uhhhhh YES I would like an invite to the cocktail community
Let's get the party going
Levi, you could totally start those communities :)
True, I could make it for me and for 'em.
netflix, get this person a special
Awesome news! Good luck on the road ahead and getting it launched.
I love this line and DEV's continued commitment to that vision, keep it up!
Thanks, Ryan!
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.