I do understand, though I guess what I’m trying to say is not that Zulip specifically is a superior channel of communication. What I think I’m trying to say is that we should push to reduce fragmentation of the community as much as possible by encouraging one “official” / “recommended” (phrase it how one feels most comfortable with) channel of communication – and I think Zulip is most adapted for that.
The Rust community still has a discord, a discourse etc. But the maintainer and all rust teams discussion officially happen on Zulip (including with some Zulip-specific automation to the workflow, see the --fetch-zulip-id flag for instance). This, in turn, is an incentive to centralise the community there, and for the community to engage with these discussions.
Also, this structure is enforced by the ecosystem leaders (i.e. the Rust core team). Rust’s CONTRIBUTING.md explicitly contains the following sentences:
The best way to get started is by asking for help in the #new members Zulip stream. We have a lot of documentation below on how to get started on your own, but the Zulip stream is the best place to ask for help.
It is recommended to ask for help on the rust-zulip, but any of these platforms are great ways to seek help and even find a mentor!
In addition, Standard Library Contribution Guide, and other core components of the Rust ecosystem, such as Cargo explicity structure their workflow and communication around Zulip, and redirect any newcommer to these channels
If you have a general question about Cargo or its internals, feel free to ask on Zulip.
So yes, people have their preferred channel of communication, and I’m not saying everybody should be moving now to Zulip or that discord should go away. But I do think that the model of “organising the community, language, standard library, compiler etc.. around a single polyvalent (synchronous and asynchronous) communication channel” works.
Note that I keep arguing for Zulip but I do have big issues with the app. Including the fact that switching communities on the MacOS app just doesn’t work… I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it did work for other similar communities.