How to make the most of DEV if you’re over Twitter

Twitter has played an important role for software developers over the last decade or so. It’s been the de facto networking hub of sorts, and it’s played an important part of helping people stay up to date with software trends. We have a large audience via our @ThePracticalDev and distribute community content through our feeds on a daily basis.

But the roles that different platforms play in the ecosystem can change. Elon Musk recently acquired Twitter, and things are getting shaken up. Regardless of how you feel on the issue, Twitter’s status as a central “Hub” is in question.

DEV is one player in a broader mission pushing towards a more independent web. We’re also a a hub of sorts for the software developer ecosystem. As such, I’d like to outline some steps you can take to make the most of your experience on DEV as a hub, while also supporting a mission oriented around supporting the Independent Web.

This will be the start of a series of posts helping folks make the most of DEV, based on different needs.

First, what do we mean by a more independent web?

DEV is based on our open source code Forem, which also operates the CodeNewbie Community as well as The Ops Community (not affiliated with us, just using our open source code), This MMA Life and others. Internally, our team made the choice earlier this year to focus on DEV’s community health as our greatest priority while continuing the steady march towards the proper Forem abstraction.

With that said, let’s focus on DEV.

For many folks, DEV has become a substantial part of their professional profile as a developer. It is a place to build one’s professional identity in a way that is more nuanced than your GitHub code, and more mainstream and verifiable than your blog itself. People share here because they want the community, the distribution, or just to help build the community knowledge base that grows with each post.

However, the real opportunity on DEV is the learning. The DEV home feed is still far from perfect, but we are making steady improvements towards our goal of regularly serving more relevant and high quality content. If you would like to dive into the code, you can view our specific feed strategies right here. Again, we have a long way to go, but we’re continuing our steady march towards a more useful home feed, which we hope you can observe if you stop by more often.

Today’s tips focus on the home feed

How to make the most of your home feed

We seek to make the feed as relevant by default as possible, but that is a journey. There is a lot you can do to improve your experience today. A few minutes of your time spent on these tasks will make DEV better for everyone.

Follow tags relevant to you. #️⃣

1. If you have not already done so, stop by the tags page and follow everything you might be interested in.
2. Next, go to your tags dashboard and assign a higher weight to your top tags (generally up to 10 for the ones you want to see more of).

Follow members relevant to you. 👩🏻‍💻🧑🏿‍💻👨🏼‍💻🧑🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻

1. For each of your most important tags, click into that tag and select by “top this month”, and see who is posting interesting stuff. Follow all of those people.
2. Follow at least 100 people. You can always unfollow them later.

Adjust your “experience level” in your settings. 🐣

1. We allow you to adjust your experience level to help you see more of what might be most relevant to you.
2. Adjust this number to your desired settings. Don’t worry, it’s just a “nudge”. Close enough is close enough, and we still serve a variety of content.

React to posts you like. ❤️

1. If you like something, add a heart.
2. If you want to keep it around, bookmark it. This will help your feed improve by sending signals while also showing your appreciation towards others in the community.