Here's the latest update on all the ideas outlined here...
For Empowering Community
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Too bad it couldn't be a nice round number, like 512.
😄
Nice.
😅
i cant like this post cuz it's 128
Thank you for your sacrifice zachary
I grew up spending a ton of time in "niche" forums hosted on phpBB and vBulletin. It was amazing to go incredibly deep in different subject areas, create true human connections on those boards, and even build a reputation as a member of these communities.
In the past decade or so of internet time, it feels like so many of those awesome "small" communities have been consumed by the bigger platforms. We've traded away the magic of those experiences for a "modern" feature-set on big monolithic platforms.
I'm still a member of a few "old school" communities, but it's clear that keeping up on the technology side is usually super difficult, expensive, and just generally out of the leadership's core experience. It's also clear that for many of these communities, inclusivity, user safety, and data protection is something of an after-thought.
I'm incredibly excited that DEV will be able to empower community leaders to host interesting, independent, and constructive spaces for their communities. They'll get all the benefits of a modern social platform (backed by a network of open-source contributors), without trading their users' safety and privacy to a large corporation.
Hopefully DEV is able to play a part in restoring some of the magic to these communities, helping them come back better than ever.
Do you think that it would be "super difficult, expensive" to take forums like gearslutz.com and rewrite their client experience? It doesn't seem that crazy... - but not doing something is way easier than doing something. I just don't think anyone is selling them on the value, yet. Niche communities don't seem new or different - just more or less ugly and filled with different ads and being scraped for data for different purposes.
Our future outlook isn't possible without the wonderful humans that make up this community - from the anonymous readers to the daily writers. It's amazing to have shared values with so many people. Thanks everyone for being part of DEV - and we're really looking forward to what we can all accomplish together :)
You may also appreciate a backlog reading material based on posts we've made which highlight the why and how of what we do.
Here's an example of an ongoing code quality/maintenance project calling for contributions...
Call for Contributions: Move All Cache Keys From Memcache to Redis
Molly Struve ・ Nov 1 ・ 1 min read
Here's a recent post outlining what's currently available with our API and an overview of our general approach to this component of our platform...
State of the API, October/November 2019
rhymes ・ Nov 1 ・ 3 min read
Here's a post outlining the evolution of our team dynamic...
The DEV Team is now 100% Distributed
Jess Lee (she/her) ・ Oct 10 ・ 4 min read
Here is a post from a recent product launch outlining some of the ways to interact with DEV as a component of the ecosystem...
You can now generate self-hostable static blogs right from your DEV content via Stackbit
Ben Halpern ・ Sep 26 ・ 4 min read
Here is another ecosystem post, showing off the new "Share to DEV" button that is live on Stack Overflow...
Native "Share to DEV" button is now on Stack Overflow
Ben Halpern ・ Aug 30 ・ 1 min read
Here is a post celebrating a year of open source...
DEV Went Open Source One Year Ago Today, And We Have So Much More Planned!
Ben Halpern ・ Aug 8 ・ 4 min read
Here is a post commenting on the nature of Medium in the developer ecosystem, contrasting it to what we're working on...
Medium Was Never Meant to Be a Part of the Developer Ecosystem
Ben Halpern ・ Jun 3 ・ 5 min read
And finally, here is a post from a long time ago from the very very early stage of some of the topics we discuss in this post. Some of our ideas have changed, many of the core principles have not. It's exciting that we have been able to make progress on these ideas while continuing to be practical devs squashing day-to-day bugs.
How dev.to could topple Facebook
Ben Halpern ・ Mar 22 '18 ・ 5 min read
Do I hear a dev.to conference any time in the future?
Hopefully! We're looking into it. No promises.
Dev.to Dallas, JUST SAYING ;)
I'd love to help, I've helped organize a few. Let me know if you start getting serious.
5x Growth at that scale is amazing! Congrats on the success.
There's a storm brewing in the online world and I feel like things are about to get shaken up a bit with DEV at the forefront. Personal sites are coming back and hopefully with it small hyper specific forums and such.
I'm sooooo excited about the role of personal sites online. I think some people see them as a one-to-one replacement for, say, Facebook, which is missing out on the common space that Facebook created that just wasn't so much a thing before.
But with personal sites that are compatible with communities we get to take back our digital identities while having standard ways to engage.
As developers we can be early adopters of solutions that have one or two steps of complication (perhaps exciting complication), but the average internet user seriously needs this system to just work in order to adopt it.
I think we can get to the point where enough of this just works.
I love this community and I really appreciate all the hard work that goes into it! <3<3<3
Thanks Tammy! I have to say it's always a pleasure to see you show up in my feed and comment sections. You're always here to be helpful 😄
But still, I'm forced to use Github or Twitter to authenticate on DEV. Why not offer email based auth rather than proprietary based auth ?
You talk about decentralization but I don't see ActivityPub nor OStatus feature coming out. Still, it would be an amazing feature to interconnect many "small" communities and to be independent from proprietary platforms.
Finally, working on ease the self-hosting and on the interoperability of the DEV platform would help to make it the most resilient and inclusive platform of the Web.
That should be, IMO, the next priorities of the staff and contributors.
Thanks for the great work and for sharing your thoughts with the community.
That's a very good question. Yes, eventually we would like to expand authentication methods. Currently we rely on social auth as a component of our anti-(spam/trolling/harassment) measure, but would love to offer other solutions provided we can make it compatible with other user safety concerns.
That's another good point, and speaks to our nature to focus primarily on user safety and user experience as the first priority, but we've had various types of protocol compatibility as a component of what we do to whatever extent is possible.
On the journey to distribute power and leverage we're a bit more inward focused on the day-to-day practical choices we need to make to get from zero to one, but as we get more momentum here, we want to be more thoughtful about shared standards.
I'm totally fine with Twitter or GitHub login. Adding other platforms would be an awesome improvement, will help to open the community more. Like, here in Argentina Twitter it's not soo popular between Devs, first time I saw the login I was like "eh?". But you can add, let's say, FCC auth, StackOverflow, some more dev platforms.
[/spoiler]I've explained my self right? God knows xD[/spoiler]
Using GAFA auth makes GAFA stronger and strengthen their dominant position.
Yeah, that's why I'm not saying Google login, Outlook login... FCC would be great, Hackernews, Stackoverflow
That's a super nice goal.
Slack is amazingly bad for small communities
Slack has always been sort of a round hole/square peg for most of the things it's used for. We use it within DEV for inter-team communication but I've never been satisfied with the "community" applications of it. (And they've never been particularly interested in supporting this).
If Slack were a better solution I probably never would have started DEV in the first place.
Thanks a lot for this!!!
I've really felt "at home" here recently, and, as a great upside, I'd like to think that I'm actually getting more motivated to learn new things so I can write about them, and, my Flask series already has enabled me to build my most complex side-project to date. And I keep coming up with new ideas :) Thanks so much for this awesome platform :D
Just wanted to give a shout-out to the Dev.io team for keeping their recurring updates low volume and high quality. One of very few email updates that I actually look forward to reading through.
Well done guys, well done!
Yes totally agree with this!
Please add possibility to ignore posts tagged with specific tag (i.e. I don't care about 'react') so such a posts doesn't appear on my home page and make an useless noise.
Second idea to round up your future plan would be events organiser component as alternative to broken (search, spam comments, ..) MeetUp.com
I think there is some crud which still makes it hard to adopt DEV.to to launch your own platform because parts of the codebase need to be more vanilla so people are comfortable launching their own instances.
I wish I had the time, but I would love to launch a Cloud Computing version of DEV.to that is more niche in terms or tagging. I think DEV.to really needs someone to adopt an alternative to push it so it can be more agnostic.
I think if we want to make the platform-agnostic we need to start moving sections of the codebase into Rails Engines to prepare them to be their own repo.
Once you have a vanilla codebase and modular codebases you create provisioning scripts for multiple multiple cloud providers.
It just depends on how you want to monetize. Is it the platform or the traffic or both?
Yep, this falls into stuff we more or less have agreement on as far as how we get there. There is a long list of challenges ahead which we haven't wanted to address because the number one way we fail is losing touch with the basic needs of running this single DEV instance.
In the past few weeks, mostly since @molly_struve and @jacobherrington joined the core team to bring relevant experience and new perspective, we've begun truly thinking through some of what you're describing. But we're giving ourselves a long leash in terms of eventually making this codebase appropriately agnostic and technically efficient.
We'd eventually like to provide a few managed options and do support for the ecosystem alongside continuing to thoughtfully monetize this and any other networks we spin up to operate ourselves.
I do feel I should say sorry to you Ben. You've probably heard my complaint about modularizing one too many times now.
I plan on forking and starting an industrial automation blog, where people can do the same like on dev.to. At the moment most PLC talk, and industrial automation is on vendors sites. plctalk is a forum site but if you want to write articles is extremely hard to find a home. I almost started on one vendor site but it was too rigid, too many guidelines, don't post anywhere else, submit articles in word doc, etc. I got discouraged to even write about my expertise.
Please add possibility to ignore posts tagged with specific tag (i.e. I don't care about 'react') so such a posts doesn't appear on my home page and make useless noise.
Second idea to round up your future plan would be events organiser component as alternative to broken (search, spam comments, ..) meetup.com
I've been hoping to see the team do this for a while. I think the direction StackOverflow took with communities (if not moderation) was great. Really excited to see it happen!
Do you have any examples yet of other people/communities using the platform to do their own thing? It's totally cool if not, it's still early days, but it would be neat to see what others are doing with it.
Apologies if this is something that could have easily been answered by looking on Github; it's already been a long day and it's still an hour before lunch.
This is an awesome move. I love the vision of distributed and independently controlled platforms that can still cooperate on accounts and content discovery. This will hopefully be the future of all digital platforms.
I love this direction -- helping other communities grow in spaces that have their best interests at heart is a great, great goal.
Have you all thought about what could be done to minimize the "friction" of getting non-technical communities up and running? Making it as approachable as possible seems difficult, but so worthwhile.
Similarly to other technologies like, say, Kubernetes, I think there's a period of natural complexity before better tooling and abstractions are built on top.
I think we will naturally have a "one click solution" where the hosting and open source and everything in-between is kind of abstracted away, but in terms of order of operations we're trying to first get the fundamentals and underlying metal to be sound before trying to layer simplicity over top.
Thanks for explaining -- that makes a lot of sense.
I have no idea how I missed this, but I really love this news. Thank you for adding value to the community where we've seen others extract from it!
If I could, I'd invest in dev.to (I used to! But iirc the paid portion faded away...)
@ben @jess @peter can we please get possibility to make it not sticky or even to hide "crayons-layout__sidebar-right" similar to existing setting for Site Navbar (FixedToWindow vs StaticAtTheTop)? It is very distracting from the actual article/post text and it would be very appreciated. Thanks a lot & keep rocking
I'm really interested and looking forward to how Dev.
Could help developer communities to move from meetup to Dev due to their recent price changes.
Since conceiving of this plan, knowing it was in the distant future (now still longterm thinking, but we're getting closer to day zero), it's been fascinating to see so many shakeups we could have capitalized on if we were ready.
The meetup thing, many broken promises from some of the giants, and generally problematic monopolistic tendencies abound.
Each time I get the feeling of "oh darn, if only we were ready". But then I think that if we're truly supposed to be in it for the long haul, we'll be ready when we're ready and hopefully deliver a lot of good to the online community when we are.
No worries as techies some of the developer communities are thinking of ways to counter the recent change to meetup.
Hopefully, when Dev is ready I could influence the developer communities to move to Dev as our goto platform for it.
It has always been a blast to be Dev ever since I had signed up for it.
will be nice some builder to build in all the languages .. AI , the builder asking and select the best way to create .. all mixed :)
A lot people like me , dont have natural skills for languages but we have skills to design soo i wanna my fuking builder
So excited for the future of DEV! This is a truly special part of the ecosystem, which I have no doubt will keep making an unmistakable, indelible impact for good on the programming industry.
Great and ambitious ideas that can definitely be accomplished! Kudos!
I think the key driver that makes dev.to so unique and successful is the culture that the core team has established either through posts of their own or through encouraging contributors. Adopting the dev.to platform is the easy part. Replicating the culture is the most difficult.
This is awesome! In addition to developer communities, I would love to run a local instance of this site as a company intranet and/or knowledge sharing platform - effectively replacing tools like Confluence.
Nothing but 💖
Really happy to see the community growing. I am really proud to be one of the early users of this platform. Keep up the good work. All the best.
wooow, perfect thoughts. well written article, was a pleasure to read!
Congratulations!
Kudos! It's really great to hear that Dev.to has been doing so well. Well deserved.
Rooting for y'all.
Great work! I love being a fly on the wall here.
@ben , so you didn't include decentralization on this post?
Incredible. Keep pushing you inspire community owners like us.
Metadata ||Metasploit?
💖👍😎
Would love to see a good API and VS Code integration.
Clearly you aren't doing this alone... Wikimedia, in particular, has done this successfully. I'm optimistic for our future!
Best of luck, team!
Thanks Dev Team for the great work.
Will there be an official DEV.to app? Or is there already one?
There are two! One for iOS and one for Android.
You can find them in the stores as "DEV Community"
Exciting times! Looking forward to see the company evolve. 👏🏻
i like support and continue my work with dev thank you.