Forem is an open-source platform for building community publishing sites—most famously powering the DEV community—that emphasizes authoring, discoverability, and social features tailored to niche communities. It combines long-form posts, collections, tagging, and following mechanisms with membership controls, moderation tools, and monetization options to let communities grow sustainably. The platform supports rich authoring (markdown, embeds), comment threading, reactions, and community curation so content creators and readers can engage in meaningful discussions rather than transient exchanges. Forem is designed to be portable and extensible: it exposes APIs for ingestion and embeds, theming options for brand alignment, and admin features for content policy, moderation workflows, and analytics. It encourages community governance patterns that let moderators and members participate in shaping norms and surfacing high-quality content.
Features
- Long-form articles, posts, and discussion threads with comments
- Follow tags, user profiles, ability to subscribe or follow content / authors
- Moderation and community moderation tools
- Responsive, mobile friendly UI
- Extensible via plugins/themes or configuration; ability to host your own Forem instance
- Backend built on Rails; frontend transitioning to more lightweight, performant frameworks (Preact)