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Ben Halpern
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Why Forem is Special with Ben Halpern

Ben is a co-founder of Forem, the open source social network platform designed for empowering community. He is from Halifax, Nova Scotia and has a focus primarily in web development.

Here is a download link to the talk slides (PDF)


This talk will be presented as part of CodeLand:Distributed on July 23. After the talk is streamed as part of the conference, it will be added to this post as a recorded video.

Top comments (42)

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Fernando

🌱✨

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Ben Halpern

🌱

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Reece M • Edited

The Forem's picker looks like Discord server pickers. Looks cool though

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Ben Halpern

For sure

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Reece M

Was the chat panel live when you were talking and this came through? 🤔

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Ceora Ford

I love how the name "Forem" was created! That's so clever

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Ben Halpern

😇

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Arit Developer

Forem is a veritable GAME-CHANGER! Super excited to learn more about it. Thanks @benhalpern! 🌱

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Terri Fricker

I loved hearing the history of how Dev and Forem have come into being.

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Ben Halpern

I'll be giving this talk later today, where I'll be walking through all of these slides and giving more info about forem.

I'll also be happy to answer questions here after my talk. But I'm also here if anyone wants to ask about forem stuff ahead of the talk. 😊

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Vitor Paladini • Edited

First thing that comes to my mind when thinking "multiple instances of forem" is something like area51.stackexchange.com. Is this analogy correct-ish?

And with that in mind, considering an eventual multi language support, do you think that it should work inside the original DEV as a feature (like a per user language preference) or it makes more sense to be in a separated place like pt.dev.to or es.dev.to?

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Ben Halpern

Yup— Not so different from stack exchange, but each thing is its own thing entirely. We may host other forems, but we don't run them. Everyone can leverage their own domains, move off if they change their minds, port data, etc.

DEV/Forem has some support for multi-language, but we are working on improving the overall feature set for content and i18n... But separate instances for language defaults may also make sense for DEV... And certainly for some forems.

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Lee Wynne

Oooo that one in the middle looks coooooool!!!!

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Kyle MacLean Smith

Great talk! Thank you for sharing your principles. Looking forward to seeing where Forem grows. Cheers.

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Terri Fricker

I hear so much positivity. "from the bottom of our hearts", "collaboration is a superpower". Thank you.

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Ben Halpern

Awwww thanks 😄

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Omar • Edited

forem is dev , and dev is forem ,
dev is build for developers , developers build dev.
Btw I make a PR and I can say that you should do it also , because the minds behind this forem are great you will get helpful tips from them , also redirection and discussion about your code!

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Peter Kim Frank

And your PR benefits not only DEV, but all current and future communities built on Forem!

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Ben Halpern

Awesome!

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Ken Darling

Is that a Rick Roll?

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ItsASine (Kayla)

I loved that it wasn't referenced. Just a slide with this Youtube video as an embed.

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Ben Halpern

This was the inspiration behind that.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

You're my favorite person. I'm such a better person for having clicked that link.

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Ken Darling

He got me too

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ItsASine (Kayla)

This talk is

on fire

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Ben Halpern

In covid days, it's probably the most I've really spoken outloud all at once in a long time. So I'm I didn't entirely stumble through it 😝

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