Forem Self-Host
forem.dev
forem.dev
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?
Background processes, on-the-fly image optimization/caching— It's more shopify for independent social networking than it is classical forum software.
I know this is besides your point, but I wouldn't credit Discourse with any standards but horrible UX. It's the worse of (new) Reddit combined with the worst of forum software. Horrendous.
My experience overall has been that, for a project supported by a company that wants you to pay them to run the software, it's almost _too_ easy to run. One click upgrades in the client, generally fantastic documentation and resources for when you need to go deeper, and a really solid story (albeit time consuming) for the situation when you need to transition from the one-click-style installation to multi-node. Personally I've found Discourse to be so simple to install and relatively painless to manage over the years that I'd honestly be shocked to find something better in that regard.
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
I like the software, and congrats on making it available to all. Wish there was a simple compose up option.
> bin/container-setup
You just need to copy the .env_sample file to .env. I ran it on my Mac and worked right out the gate to poke around locally.
i can see myself in the 90s cursing about all the lame rich kids just paying for silly domain names instead of using readily available IP addresses you needed to host already.
Nothing is deeply cloud-specific in the core stack— Opportunities to go cloud agnostic are there, we just might have to do it via contribution, as we have a few important projects on the go with conflict with the time this would take. But it's open source, and it will happen :)