Blog Post: Silos in the Elixir Community

I feel your pain, Zach. Every time I see a question posted in the Slack or Discord channels, I die a little on the inside.

I always make a point of asking questions here, when I have them. At least the answers can be found through a good old-fashioned Google search, instead of ending up in some walled-garden black hole like Slack or Discord.

Completely agree. EF is easy to manage, the topic division is very powerful compared to everyone spamming in the same channel as it happens on slack/discord.

Usually even at my workplace I mute all the slack channels and tell everyone to either write to me directly or tag me, otherwise its impossible to get work done or understand what is going on.

If we talk specifically about questions or discussions, EF is superior in every way, especially compared to stackoverflow, where the format imposed limits very hard clarification of the question, which results in a lot of cases in poor answers.

For news, I think the idea is to mirror everything on all platforms, seems more difficult lately as it was mentioned that twitter closed their API, but nobody cancelled good old webscrapping (unless they already have captcha checks in place for bots).

Is there an example of a language that “does things right”? In terms of the stated problem.

In a lot of ways, I think Elixir is one such example. Insofar as we have some of these right things. The leadership of the community is very accessible, and participates here on this forum, etc. So while I think we can do better, we’re also doing pretty well.

As for other languages, I can’t speak for their communities unfortunately, having been so embedded in primarily the Elixir ecosystem for so long.

First of all, thank you so much for bringing all of this up @zachdaniel. Communication channels are very difficult to get right and even moreso to maintain. Your article does a great job acknowledging the difficulty therein, especially through the lens of someone with a vested interest in clear, well-established communication.

That being said, I respectfully disagree with your article’s conclusion. As someone who has been writing Elixir for a few years now, ElixirForum (EF) is similar to StackOverflow in that I normally land here after googling a specific problem and leave if the thread does not have a solution to my problem. Rarely, if ever, am I browsing EF for general Elixir news or updates. Alternatively, for those who are pillars of the community, such as yourself, I can see how EF would be a more important resource. However, for those that are not as deeply involved, a more casual feed is much more digestible. And to be completely honest, the UI is quite overwhelming to someone who is not a power-user of the platform.

With the instability of Twitter and “walled garden” nature of Slack/Discord, I would make the argument for making Bluesky the new home for Elixir news and updates. Bluesky seems to have the best of both worlds: a casual feed that is open to the public, but also a more organized structure that allows for more in-depth conversations. I think this would be a great way to bridge the gap between the casual and deeply involved Elixir community members.

You’re making good points, and I do personally prefer bluesky to twitter. However, I don’t think that twitter or bluesy should be taken as a “news source”. I also don’t really think that bluesky is all that better for discourse than twitter.

Additionally, I think that “moving” to bluesky ultimately is just kicking the can down the road. We’d be moving from one private company w/ no vested interest in any one community’s success to, well, a different private company w/ no vested interest in any one community’s success.

Take any given news organizations website. CNN.com, foxnews.com as two examples. These are dense with information in a very similar way that ElixirForum is. Tools like bluesky and twitter, are IMO, not a “good way to stay up to date”. They are a good way to engage for a period of time. It is ordered into a digestible feed, but not optimized for information gathering or in-depth interaction.

In a vein of instagram/tik tok, they are just slightly less egregious dopamine machines.

To be clear, I’d love to not use twitter. And I’d love even more if people migrated to bluesky. But I don’t personally see bluesky or anything like it as a platform that the community should rally around as our “hub” or “news source”.

But it’s true that elixirforum isn’t really great for communicating with the broader programming community. Something like Bluesky and twitter is how the “outside world” sees what we’re doing currently.