What would you like to know most about the future of the Forem product? Answer for the chance to be featured on our podcast!

The DevDiscuss Podcast begins with an interview and ends with commentary from listeners — and we like to feature the actual voices from our community!

To inform an upcoming episode of the show, we'd like to know...

“What would you like to know most about the future of the Forem product?”

For your chance to hear your actual comments on an upcoming episode, answer the question above by:

• Calling our Google Voice at [phone] and leave a message 📞

• Sending a voice memo to [e-mail] 🎙

• OR, leaving a comment here (we'll read your response aloud for you) 🗣

Please send in your recordings by Wednesday, April 21st at Midnight, ET (9 PM PT, 4 AM UTC)

Voice recordings will be given priority placement 😉

---

Comments

[Thomas Bnt]

Will Forem become a kind of CMS that can be easily installed? Will you set up cloud services to have its own node?

[Ben Halpern]

I'm not sure I'm supposed to be answering here, but I will— Yes. I believe. Can you expand and clarify this part:

Will you set up cloud services to have its own node?

[Thomas Bnt]

Two possibilities :

• Self hosting
• In your cloud with maintenance

The cloud is a good choice for non developers.

[Ben Halpern]

Yup, this is exactly what we will launch.

Our initial Forem Cloud option will be for the more "Professional Tier" because our automation and technical support isn't yet ready to scale to support massive amounts of Forems, so basically the plan is:

• Make self-hosting as easy and cheap as possible. We will roll out with playbooks for popular cloud providers, and there will be plenty of opportunity for the community to help expand playbook support.
• Roll out Forem Cloud for pro users who would rather pay us to fully manage, automate, and also get our support on effective community management. As we ramp up our infrastructure we'll expand to the tier at the lower price point who wouldn't be technical enough for self-hosting.

Even though I'm very excited to get Forem Cloud to the point where it can serve a broad amount of users with zero maintenance burden or technical understanding needed, I'm also excited about the interim of broadening the market by teaching some folks how to host on DigitalOcean, etc. It will be fun to see if we can attract some new Code Newbies and teach them how to run a few deployment scripts. 😅

[Thomas Bnt]

Very clear response! Thanks you @ben ! 🐼💪🏼

[Ravi Krishnappa]

How do you address FOMO? Fear of missing out? I visit dev.to and Reddit and freecodecamp to make sure I'm aware of all web application stack as well as emerging technologies. Rust, Julia and Webassembly.

If Forem becomes very very easy to deploy on a $10 Linode server, niche sites will proliferate. Will there be a Single Sign On to navigate across niche sites? How about one dedicated Forem site for enabling membership across niche Forem sites?

[Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers]

Are you planning to go the GitLab route, where different tiers of the software include different features that are useful for organizations at different sizes (and therefor likely different budgets)?

[Lee]

Why would someone choose to build their community with Forem over Slack and then Reddit?

[Forest Hoffman]

What cloud platforms are serving as inspiration for the future design of Forem? Is there a mold for CMS platforms that Forem is intended to break?