A self-hosted home for support, tips, feature requests, and showcases - at forum.yaw.sh.
The Yaw community has a new home: forum.yaw.sh. It is a fresh self-hosted Discourse, running on AWS, available now. Sign up, ask a question, post a tip, file a feature request, show off something you built. That is the whole pitch.
This post is the longer answer to "why a forum, and why now."
A few weeks ago I created a brand-new Discord account to start a Yaw community server. Within hours of signing up, the account was banned. No prior history, no posts, no warnings. Just gone. Appeals went into a black hole. I am still not entirely sure what tripped the filter - new account, VPN, something behavioral - but the outcome was the same either way.
That was a good cold splash of water. I had been about to build a community on a platform where the platform itself could wipe it overnight, with no recourse, for reasons it would never explain. If that ban had landed six months later, with thousands of threads and the kind of institutional memory a real community accumulates, it would have been a disaster. As it was, it cost me nothing except a little dignity and a useful reframe.
So I sat with the question for a while: where should the Yaw community actually live?
Discord and Slack are great for vibes. They are bad at almost everything else a developer community needs from a public space.
Q&A in chat does not compound. Someone asks "how do I get ssh-agent to load on startup," they get an answer, the answer scrolls off the screen, and the next person to hit the same problem either re-asks it or never finds the existing thread. Search inside chat tools is famously poor - even when it works, it returns fragments without context. Google does not index it at all.
A forum thread is the opposite. Title, body, replies, accepted answer, all on one canonical URL that ranks in search and stays put. Every question answered once is a question answered forever. That is the kind of asset a small product like Yaw can use a lot more of.
Once I accepted the forum framing, the software choice got easy. Discourse is what serious open-source and developer communities run on - Rust, Elixir, Vue, Astro, Tailscale, Letterboxd, dozens more. It is fifteen years old, actively developed, plugin-rich, and has the trust badges, categories, and moderation primitives you actually want once a community grows.
It is not flashy. That is the point. Picking the boring tool with a long track record means I get to spend my time on Yaw the product, not on building forum software in 2026.
The audience here is technical, so here is what is under the hood:
The CloudFormation template and runbook live in the YawLabs/mcp-hosting-infra repo, alongside the rest of the Yaw Labs infrastructure. If you have ever wanted to read someone else's "small Discourse on AWS" templates, those are public.
I picked CloudFormation over Terraform for the usual reasons - no licensing risk, no state file to babysit, day-one AWS service support, the cloud provider supports the tool forever. The longer version of that argument is in Why CloudFormation Wins When Terraform's License Is a Liability if you are still on the fence.
I have seeded categories for the things I expect people will want to talk about:
The categories will probably move around for the first month or two as I see what people actually post. That is fine. Categories are cheap to rename.
No Discord. No Slack. No Matrix bridge yet. If a real-time chat layer eventually makes sense, it will be a thing the forum links out to, not the place the community lives. The forum is the source of truth, and the source of truth needs to be searchable and durable.
I am also not pretending this is going to be a thriving community on day one. It is one person and a fresh Discourse install. The first few weeks of any forum look quiet. The thing that turns it from quiet into useful is the boring work of answering questions, posting tips, and giving the indexers something to chew on. That work starts now.
If you use Yaw, run a Yaw Mode session, ship MCP servers, or just want to argue about CloudFormation, the door is open: forum.yaw.sh. Sign up takes a minute. The first 20 questions are the most valuable - they are the threads everyone who comes after will land on from Google.
And if you ever build a community somewhere, host it somewhere a single moderation bot cannot end you. The fifteen-dollar-a-month EC2 box you control beats the free chat platform that owes you nothing.
Published by Yaw Labs.
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