bhalp1

This is true— But also, we will support the journey towards being 100% cloud agnostic— It just wasn't worth holding up this release to get it all perfect.

Nothing is deeply cloud-specific in the core stack— Opportunities to go cloud agnostic are there, we just might have to do it via contribution, as we have a few important projects on the go with conflict with the time this would take. But it's open source, and it will happen :)

Yes, Forem is extracted from dev.to— which was built to reach millions— With crowdsourced moderation, feed algorithms, rich editors, etc, and we're working backwards from there. So yeah, it's a little complicated at this layer of the stack, and getting simpler over time as we work to extract from the core.

Background processes, on-the-fly image optimization/caching— It's more shopify for independent social networking than it is classical forum software.