By leveraging the power of open-source, and sharing incentives with a network of community-oriented leaders, we can help provide the seeds for more amazing and unique communities to grow and blossom.
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.
http://perpetual.education is a design/programming school. We like to be part of the discussion over here at Dev.to / We have time-slots for free conversations for career advice IRL : )
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.
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
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.