--- title: "What is a developer community? | daily.dev Ads glossary" url: https://business.daily.dev/glossary/developer-community/ description: "A developer community is a group of developers who gather around a technology or a product to ask, answer, share and build: a forum, a chat server, an open-source project, a content network such as daily.dev, or a meetup." lastUpdated: "2026-10-20" llmsTxt: https://business.daily.dev/llms.txt --- ## What is a developer community? A developer community is a group of developers who gather around a technology or a product to ask, answer, share and build: a forum, a chat server, an open-source project, a content network such as daily.dev, or a meetup. Communities come in kinds. Product communities form around one tool and are usually hosted by its maker. Topic communities form around a language, a framework or a practice, and belong to no one. Content communities, such as daily.dev, form around reading and discussing what is new. Most developers belong to several at once. For a company, a community is where developers learn about products from each other, which is the recommendation that carries the most weight. It is also where they say what is wrong, which is the feedback that arrives nowhere else. A company that hosts or joins a community well gains both. The difference between a community and an audience is participation: an audience reads, a community answers. That is why communities are slow to build and hard to fake, and why a presence in an existing one is often worth more than a new one with no members. ## What kinds of developer community are there? - **Product communities,** hosted by a vendor around one tool: a Discord, a forum, GitHub discussions. - **Topic communities** around a language, framework or practice: subreddits, Discords, Stack Overflow tags, meetups. Owned by no one. - **Content communities,** where developers read, upvote and discuss what is new. daily.dev is one. - **Open-source projects,** whose issue trackers and chat are communities in everything but name. - **Local and event communities:** meetups, user groups, conferences. A company can host the first kind, join the second and fourth, and keep a standing presence in the third. Most developers are in several at once, and the same question travels between them. ## How should a company show up in a community it does not own? As a member. Answer questions where you know the answer, including ones that have nothing to do with your product. Post your own content only where the rules allow and only when it solves something. Disclose who you work for. Let engineers do the talking; a community manager relaying answers is slower and less trusted than the person who built the thing. The companies that get it wrong treat communities as distribution: they drop links, they DM members, they argue with critics. The ban that follows is permanent and the screenshot travels. ## When is it time to host your own? When users are already asking each other questions somewhere inconvenient, when support sees the same questions repeatedly, or when the product has enough active users that a room would not be empty. The common failure is launching a Discord at the same time as the product, with ten employees and no members. Before hosting, decide what the community is for (support, learning, feedback, showcase), who moderates, which engineers will be present, and how you will report what shipped because of it. Without the last, members stop asking. ## What does a content community like daily.dev add? A content community gathers developers around reading rather than around one product, which makes it the place to reach the ones who do not know you yet. daily.dev collects 2,000+ content sources in one place (daily.dev platform data, October 2026 (up from 1,300+ in Media Kit 2.0, August 2026)); developers upvote and discuss, follow sources, and come back 6–7× a day. A [verified company page](https://business.daily.dev/verified-company/) is a standing presence there: your posts sit beside everything else developers chose, and a developer who found two of them useful follows the page. That following is the start of a community you do not have to host. **Common mistakes** - Dropping links in a community you never contributed to. - A product Discord launched on day one with no members. - Community managers answering technical questions by relay. - Collecting feedback and never reporting what shipped. **How developers experience it** - They ask the community before they ask the vendor. - They remember who answered, and whether the answer was honest. - They can smell a marketing plant in the first reply. ## On daily.dev daily.dev is a content community: developers upvote, comment and follow sources. A verified company page is a standing presence in it, and your posts are read and discussed alongside everything else developers chose to follow. ## Go deeper - [Building a developer community from zero](https://business.daily.dev/resources/developer-community-building-growth-zero-to-thriving-ecosystem.md) - [Making the case for developer community to a CFO](https://business.daily.dev/resources/developer-community-roi-case-to-cfo.md) - [Building a developer community on Slack](https://business.daily.dev/resources/building-developer-community-slack-b2b-marketing-guide-technical-audiences.md) Related terms: [Community-led growth](https://business.daily.dev/glossary/community-led-growth.md) | [Developer relations](https://business.daily.dev/glossary/developer-relations.md) | [Developer audience platform](https://business.daily.dev/glossary/developer-audience-platform.md) ### Frequently asked questions **Why do developer communities matter for marketing?** Because developers trust recommendations from other developers more than any vendor message, and because communities are where products are compared honestly. Being present, useful and visible there shapes those recommendations. **Should a company build its own developer community?** Only when enough developers already use the product to sustain conversations that are not about the vendor. Until then, be present in the communities on your stack and in content networks where developers already read. **How do you measure a developer community?** Active members, the share of questions answered by members rather than staff, contributors, retention of members against non-members, and product changes that came from community feedback. **Can you advertise in a developer community?** In the ones that sell placements, yes, and the placement should look like a post, not a banner. In the ones that do not, no; contribute instead. A content community such as daily.dev is built for both: developers read, discuss and follow, and promoted posts run in the same feed. **Who should represent the company in a community?** Engineers and developer advocates, under their own names, with the company disclosed. Members trust the person who built the product over anyone speaking for them. [All terms](https://business.daily.dev/glossary.md) | [Explore your options](https://business.daily.dev/schedule/?ref=glossary-developer-community) | [How pricing works](https://business.daily.dev/pricing.md)