Hey folks! We wanted to let you know about our new subforem called Future. This is a dedicated space for talking about cutting-edge technologies that influence our careers, our day-to-day lives, culture, and everything of that nature.
What is Future?
Future is part of the core app behind DEV. Your DEV account will securely log you into Future, as well as any other subforems we create. Because Forem is open source, other self-hosted Forems can also use this subforem functionality — though we’re not prioritizing support self-hosting right now due to limited bandwidth. We hope to be more able to support this later this year.
The goal with Future is to give space for perspectives that aren't organically covered on DEV but are still very much topics our community has expertise and interest in. Discussion doesn’t have to be strictly developer-focused (though it certainly can be). It’s a separate feed with its own ranking system, giving folks an alternative environment for more niche or visionary topics.
To help make Future useful from the start, we’ve seeded the feed with some news bots that post about key topics in emerging tech. However, we really want the community to shape Future over time. As it grows more active, the focus will shift naturally toward community-driven discussions and content.
How It Fits Into DEV
We’ve enabled forem.com to act as a feed that includes posts from all the subforems we host. This is part of the ongoing evolution of the platform.
Each post you write goes to one subforem, but you can “boost” posts across Forems from the post actions area. This means you can write on Future with the most dedicated audience for emerging tech conversations and then share your post to DEV (or another subforem) if you wish. This setup should let Future exist alongside DEV without disrupting what makes DEV special. Our hope is to carve out more dedicated spaces for emerging tech discussions while keeping DEV centered on development, software engineering, and career growth.
We’ve tried a few approaches to “multi-forem” dynamics in the past, and this setup feels like the simplest and most user-friendly way forward.
Looking Ahead
Future is still in beta, but we’re excited to expand the concept to more subforems. We’ll likely stick to technology at first, but we’re open to moving beyond those boundaries if there’s enough interest.
If you’re curious about Future or just want to say hello, check out the Future Welcome Thread. This is a great opportunity to start writing about emerging tech topics, and we can’t wait to see where the discussion goes!
Final Notes:
Authentication between subforems is still beta, and does not work as reliably on Safari, or may be subject to other edge cases. But your account will ultimately work across dev.to
and forem.com
subdomains when signed in.
Your future.forem.com
profile will only exist if you post there, otherwise it redirects to DEV. Your forem.com
profile exists now and encompasses all your activity.
Happy future
Top comments (9)
We look forward to giving members the chance to moderate their own subforems in order to create communities with their own perspective and culture (while remaining welcoming!).
Any ideas for branches we could create? We're open to experimenting with big or small spaces with their own closer networks while still having the convenience of being able to pull from the core DEV userbase.
I am not sure if I am reading this properly... But - what about Europe? When it comes to tech - we tend to value openness, zero lock-in and sustainability... (Not that the rest of the world doesn't...)
It's just a question if I get it right... 'cos technically it can stay here...
What is the question exactly?
I think we are aligned in the ultimate goal of not having a singular DEV space, but fostering more choice and openness (though the whole project being open source etc.)
With this we're trying to make some of the enabling steps easier. The ethos is definitely aligned.
It's more like 'thinking out loud'... I'm sort of struggling with what would be 'pull from the dev userbase' for 'communities with their own perspective and culture'...
Basically just foster subcommunities within our app, in the way we already allow mods to do for tags and general guidance in the community. Not sharing access to info or anything like that, just the ability to lead small communities in more disparate topics.
Ahaa... Like - for 'niche' topics that would otherwise get 'diluted'... People can still use DEV for broader topics, but if they have a niche interest can also switch to something more focused?
Yes, and also everything posted to DEV is effectively for everyone, i.e. the global namespace.
So within tech, some discussion between members of a shared domain (i.e. some niche Linux distro or whatever) can have more focused convos.
And out of tech (which isn't something we're working on immediately, folks can have a space to talk about anything — but still leverage our blogging-forward format and things they like about the platform.
And since we're open source there's always the ability to do this entirely off-platform, but we're trying to make it easier to do in a more "on platform" way.
Alright, got it, sounds good to me! :)
Just to clarify - it seems I got confused at the beginning 'cos my impression was that with future you might want to 'separate' topics like 'the next big thing'. Developers like to discuss it, but as it (in my opinion) often goes beyond coding, career, etc - you might want to separate it in some way...
That led me to 'yeah, but why separate niche communities, they have other interests too'...
My bad, I think the idea has a potential, if I come up with something I will share it here.
Exciting!