The Julia Forem: What it is, why we made one, and how to use it!

Welcome to the Julia Forem! If you are reading this, you are on our new Forem instance. You might be asking yourself a lot of questions like what is this new platform, why did we set it up, or maybe what the best way to use it is. Well, we are going to answer all of these questions and more in this post so stay tuned!

What is Forem?

Forem is the platform used to build https://dev.to and is now an open source project and company (similar in nature to discourse). I suggest reading a bit about Forem on their site: https://www.forem.com.

TLDR (too long didn't read): Forem is a community platform that allows you write technical and non-technical content alike in a way that lets people:

• better engage with your content through comments and threads
• automatically have great SEO so people actually read what you write
• moderation tools
• integration with other writing platforms and much more!

Why we are using Forem

Something people frequently say to me with respect to why they don't use Julia is that "there is not enough Julia content out there". While this is true to a certain degree, a much larger issue is that much of the content is very scattered on personal blogs, random sites, and other places which makes it hard to find and engage with. Even if someone can find your blog post, there might not be a comment functionality. On Medium for example, where I have posted a few articles, I have seen my own posts get 10k+ views without any meaningful conversation around the post (besides on Twitter).

Forem is an attempt at giving people a world class tool to write and share their Julia content with a community of people who can read, discussion, and amplify that content.

Note that while we have lots of community platforms like Discourse, Slack, Zulip, a Julia Twitter community, and many more, we see Forem as filling a gap that none of these other tools do. We don't expect Forem to replace any of them but rather act as a central hub to share, write, and discuss new Julia content.

How to use Forem

Think of Forem as your own personal blogging platform. You can come here, write a post, or just read some of the cool stuff others have been working on. You can also setup your Forem account to automatically pull articles from places like Medium or the like so you can cross post them here. You are also able to set the canonical URL which is a fancy SEO term that just means you can copy an article here and then tell Google (or other search engines) that this is just the copy and you really want people to go to this other link (like your personal blog for example).

You can read the Forem FAQ here: https://forem.julialang.org/faq

The bottom line, this is a space for the community to create and share content. We hope it will improve the experience of making content, increase the reach of said content, and reduce barriers for those looking to write about Julia.

What is next?

Forem is a new platform for us. So we aren't expecting anything crazy in the first couple of weeks. But we do hope that folks find value here and decide to post their articles for the community. If you have any questions, we will do our best to answer them!