Is Self-Hosting Forem Still in Beta, or Is It Considered Production-Ready?

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to build a community platform focused on member-to-member knowledge exchange, with a portal and a modern forum. I've been evaluating Forem alongside other options like Discourse and Flarum.

I keep seeing mixed signals about Forem's self-hosting situation. On one hand, the Kamal deployment guide in the Forem repo is explicitly labeled "Deployment with Kamal (Beta)" . The official self-hosting docs also state: "We aren't quite ready for mainstream adoption of our platform" and "We aren't able to ensure support for new instances built from this project, yet" .

On the other hand, I know Forem powers dev.to itself, and the API seems solid.

So my question is: What is the actual current status of self-hosting Forem?

Is the Kamal deployment path still genuinely beta, or has it stabilized?

Are there people here running Forem in production for their own communities?

What are the biggest practical gotchas for someone deploying it today?

I'm not trying to bash Forem—I'm genuinely trying to understand if it's the right choice for a production community right now, or if I should look elsewhere until self-hosting matures.

Any real-world experiences would be really helpful.

Thanks!