Forem Self-Host

  • I'm a big fan of software that makes better communities possible online. Ever since Discourse set the standard for "good self-hosted open source forum software," I've always wished there were something simpler to deploy. However, my first impression of Forem is, "this software looks complicated."

    Can anyone more familiar briefly speak to the trade-offs that were made? Why podman, butane, ansible? Most communities are small, but it looks like the expectation here is that communities might grow to hundreds of thousands (or millions), so orchestration etc. is necessary?

  • I LOVE Forem and Dev.To

    The stack is very rational.. and "easy-ish" but its not wordpress easy..

    most groups..and social networks.. dont burst outside 500 monthly active users.. at best.. 5000~

    most groups are small and doesnt need a sophisticated scaling system.

    I often test out communities with a very simple wordpress install running buddypress... it suits most communities and its so easily movable to cloud...

    anyway.. i love Forem the dev.to guys have really created something phenomenal

  • What’s the reason there isn’t a docker compose-able way to run this? Did I miss something?

    I like the software, and congrats on making it available to all. Wish there was a simple compose up option.

  • Very strange and undesirable to launch with such specific cloud options.

  • Love the logo, very Paul Rand. I hope that's a ~27.5Âş skew! https://www.cosmic-core.org/free/article-58-geometry-the-gol...

  • how did dev.to and hackernoon appear so suddenly? For the longest time it was just medium and random people's blogs and all of a sudden these two platforms just got huge.

  • I’m disappointed that there is not a “cloud-agnostic” version. Eg a script that you can deploy to any cloud/provider ssh/instance endpoint.

  • What kind of JS and HTML templates is the front end? It's not clear from a quick skim of the github mobile website.

  • Unrelated to "Friends Of Rick E. Moose", an earlier forum software package. ah well.