I think almost everyone here can agree that Flarum is the most exciting forum software around. I tried them all. Neither one of them is as robust and fast as it is Flarum. I also believe that, due to privacy concerns, in the further years focus of average internet users will slowly shift back to smaller communities, and that's where Flarum will step in (as it already does).
However, Flarum is an open-source product. Most of the core devs don't have anything from it, but I suppose you're here (except you're a terrific human being) for the prospects of the whole project.
At the same time, just as I'm excited about Flarum, I'm as much excited about the Flarum Blog extension by @JasperVriends, @PascalBoschma, and other V17 guys (also backed by @glowingblue ), which is also open-source (you can donate here). Blog extension proved how versatile Flarum is. I firmly believe that as the combination of those two, Flarum as a platform has much more potential.
While I'm, like many of you, backing the Flarum core team and individual solo developers wherever I can, I would also like to start a momentum to get the Blog component going too. And looking for people similar to me.
For years now I'm running a relatively small but active local community. 15 years ago we were part of the much bigger local community forum, but as years passed by and social networks took over, that crashed and I with many other fellows started from the beginning. That happened 7 years ago and since then, we've been on SMF, then on wpForo (where on the support forums I met @[deleted] for the first time, can confirm that he was nice there as much as he is here 🙂), and finally we're on Flarum for the second year now. Somewhere along the way, we as a community decided to start our own blog/site which is firmly connected with the community (thanks to @clarkwinkelmann WordPress integration). That whole community together with the blog is more a passion project to us. We don't have much from it, except for personal satisfaction that we're still able to hang out and talk about our stuff outside of social networks. As the blog grows more popular, our little community is gaining new users and they are staying active because Flarum is such a friendly forum software, which is really great.
I believe many of you are just like me. Most of us are here because we would like to make our communities better. We love our privacy, independence from the bigger guys and we enjoy discussing things and hang out with other people without getting in their RL personas. I see that whenever I come here.
Ok, I got a little bit emotional and gone too wide with this 😄 so I will get to the point. I'm looking for others who would be interested in the Flarum Blog extension going. We can group, discuss what features we would like, then together fund/sponsor developers from this community. My vision of the Flarum Blog component is not too far from what it is now. Blog component should be minimalistic as it is core Flarum, but if we just make it compatible with already existing popular Flarum extensions, we've already have an exciting blog software that I would personally use over WP any day.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I'm very excited about the future of all of this and can't wait to ditch my WP blog. I hope this will create momentum for something big and can't wait to see what the future brings. I truly believe Flarum + Blog can be the next big thing.
We can discuss it further here and please free to join on our Discord server.
Blog for Flarum Support Community
https://discord.gg/nGeWpvtn8k
