Forums vs Slack with Dan Moore from FusionAuth
FusionAuth's DevRel team tried scheduling a synchronous community meetup across four continents. Two people showed up — and two of them worked at FusionAuth. Dan Moore's read: auth isn't part of anyone's identity, and pretending otherwise wastes real effort.
Dan Moore is head of developer relations at FusionAuth, an authentication and authorization provider that grew out of a content moderation tool called CleanSpeak.
We get into why FusionAuth deliberately de-emphasizes Slack in favor of an old-school forum, the failed meetup experiment that convinced Dan auth will never be part of a developer's identity the way a framework choice is, and the specific, low-cost habit of replying to newsletters and sharing other people's links that's built him real relationships with people like Corey Quinn.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
How did FusionAuth actually start?
The company goes back to around 2006-2007, when the founder built a completely different tool called CleanSpeak — a content moderation and profanity filtering tool, focused heavily on gaming. Everyone they talked to also needed a user management system, so they extracted that piece out of CleanSpeak and built it into a much bigger dev tool: authentication and authorization, aimed at a far larger market than content moderation alone. Revenue from CleanSpeak let them bootstrap the new product, so it's a private company, wholly owned by the founder. There was actually a forum-software product attempt in between the two — nobody used the forum, but people kept needing the user management piece.
How did the product and business model evolve from there?
The first name they picked was genuinely bad — Passport — around 2016, when they started really pulling it out on its own, without much early traction. Initially they just sold it the traditional commercial way, carried over from the content-moderation business, with no free tier. Eventually they made it free to run yourself, for as many users as you want — not open source, but a permissive license — while also offering a cloud version. Because of that history, it's a downloadable piece of software as much as a SaaS product, and more than one customer has told me they specifically chose FusionAuth because they could move between self-hosted and cloud. A small company without a DevOps team might start in the cloud, then later want the option to bring it in-house for cost control or compliance.
You've deliberately chosen not to emphasize Slack for your community. Why?
We do have a Slack, we just don't emphasize it. About two years ago, as we started seeing real community uptake, we had to decide between supporting Slack, a forum, or both — and I pushed hard, and won, for a forum as the primary home, with the community-run Slack still there but not very active. Slack and Discord are great for synchronous communication — quick answers, a sense of belonging, real-time help — but they're essentially a write-only medium. We kept seeing the exact same questions asked over and over in Slack, and while there are tools that extract Slack threads into more structured content, my argument was: why not just start there in the first place?
What's the actual payoff of running a forum instead?
We use NodeBB, and we now have thousands of posts there. I regularly hear from clients referencing something I wrote two or three years ago, which means Google is finding it and people are self-serving the answer without needing us directly — versus Slack, where someone from the team basically has to be present in real time to answer. Roughly 10% of our total traffic comes to forum pages — some of that's garbage traffic from an oddly popular post about the Unix `tar` command, but a large chunk is people finding us through long-tail keyword searches while actually trying FusionAuth. As a former colleague, Taylor Barnett, put it, Google is essentially the UX for developer documentation — you can build all the nice in-app search and browsing you want, but most people are just going to Google it.
Does a forum post carry a different weight or expectation than official documentation?
Yes, and that's actually a benefit. A forum post doesn't carry the same obligation to be a thousand percent accurate forever the way documentation does — if I post something today and someone finds it two years from now and it's slightly out of date, they don't feel the same anger they would finding stale official docs. I get genuinely upset when I follow documentation that turns out to be outdated, because I've just wasted real time — but a forum post carries a more relaxed, contextual expectation that it may or may not still fully apply.
You tried organizing synchronous meetups for your global user base. What happened?
I think dev tool community can go one of two ways: a Google-type community, where people show up, get their answer, and leave, or a Facebook-type community, where people want to hang out and build relationships around the product. Everyone seems to want to be the second kind. But auth is, to a real extent, a solved, standardized problem with tons of open-source, closed-source, and commercial options — it's just not as inherently exciting as, say, a flashy new Kubernetes access-control tool, which is more likely to naturally generate that Facebook-style enthusiasm. We tried to force the Facebook version anyway: we scheduled multiple meetup times to cover our audience across Europe, Australia, Asia, North America, and Latin America, posted it everywhere, did person-to-person outreach. We got four people to show up — two of them were FusionAuth team members. It was a huge amount of effort for essentially nothing toward building that community feeling.
What does that failure tell you about how developers actually relate to an auth product?
If you're a React developer, or a Svelte developer, or big into Ruby on Rails the way I am — helping run a local meetup, genuinely enjoying it — that's part of your identity. Auth, or something like a geolocation API, isn't part of anyone's identity the same way; it's just a tool you use when you need it. Deciding, as a dev tool practitioner, whether your product realistically can be part of a developer's identity or is just going to be a tool they use and forget about until the next project is a crucial, honest discussion to have before investing heavily in community-building efforts aimed at the wrong model.
What's an experiment that has actually worked well?
Community stories. With a freemium model where people can download and run our software anonymously via Docker or a Debian package, we often never hear from a user unless they file a GitHub issue or forum post. Whenever I noticed someone engaging repeatedly — multiple forum posts, multiple issues — I'd reach out and offer to do a short profile: eight to ten emailed questions, one round of follow-up, turned into a blog post with a link back to their site or app. We now have 20 or 30 of these published. It's helped me genuinely understand our community and the problems they're solving, it's good for SEO through long-tail keywords, and it's been genuinely useful for sales — a customer's own words about a real win, written a year ago, land far better with a prospect than anything a salesperson says live.
Why does that kind of proof matter so much in sales conversations?
Having worked in sales myself a long time ago, the pushback is almost always: this example is interesting, but not relevant to me — they're bigger than us, or in a different industry. Everyone wants a story from someone in the same industry, at the same size, as them. Community stories aren't a complete solution to that, but they're a real step forward, and building up enough of them over time increases the odds a prospect finds one that resonates directly with their own situation.
You appeared on Corey Quinn's podcast Screaming in the Cloud. What was that experience like?
Really fun — the company paid to have us talk about authentication, and Corey's a great interviewer. One thing stood out: during the conversation I said some genuinely complimentary things about AWS Cognito, a direct-ish competitor. At the end, Corey offered to let me cut it, and I hesitated — should I really be on record praising a competitor? He said absolutely keep it in, because it helps your credibility. If all you ever say is that your company is the perfect fit for every single problem, people roll their eyes and tune out. Actually complimenting a competitor where they genuinely do something better shows you understand the market and aren't just reflexively selling. I'll happily say Cognito is the better choice if you're fully inside the AWS ecosystem needing IAM role coordination — that's not an admission of weakness, it's honesty that builds trust.
You've built a real relationship with Corey Quinn's audience by sending him links. What's the actual practice there?
I'd challenge anyone to try this: next time something in a newsletter you subscribe to genuinely resonates, just reply and say thanks, that was great. You will be in the tiny minority of people who ever do that — I run a small newsletter myself, and out of thousands of emails sent over time, maybe ten people have ever replied. Whether it's Corey's list with tens of thousands of subscribers or mine with a few hundred, that kind of reply genuinely means something to the person writing it, because putting a newsletter or podcast out into the world often feels like shouting into a void. Beyond that, as DevRel people we're constantly out finding interesting things across Reddit, Slack, Hacker News — when you find something you think someone like Corey would find interesting, just send it to them, expecting nothing back. It costs you almost nothing and genuinely helps the person on the other end of that link too.
Does this extend to how you use Hacker News specifically?
Yes — I post my own stuff and the company's stuff there because I want the traffic, but I've also posted other people's links purely because I found them interesting, and at least three or four times that's landed on the front page, with the original author genuinely astonished and thankful. It cost me almost no effort. If Hacker News isn't your community, there's always some equivalent space where sharing something interesting helps both the person who wrote it and the people who read it, at very low cost to you.
What are the key takeaways you'd want a dev tool founder or DevRel practitioner to walk away with?
First, decide honestly whether the product you're working on can realistically become part of a developer's identity, or whether it's just a tool they'll use well and then forget about once they move to their next project — that decision should shape how much you invest in community-building efforts built around belonging versus efforts built around fast, self-serve answers. Second, just give — your time, energy, and reputation, through small things like sharing other people's links or replying to something that resonated. It's a genuinely low-cost habit that's paid real dividends for me.