I feel like I’ve repeatedly failed to make my point given your answer, so I’ll try one last time. While I do think Zulip is particularly adapted for that goal (and I have intertwined this opinion too much with the rest of my arguments) I don’t care about the specific technology.
Please see this message for what I mean with centralized. Yes Rust has a Discord, but the community and core development is organised around a single polyvalent medium.
Again, the history of this threads stems from Kiran stating this:
To which I only said that I believed the success of the Lean (and Rust) model comes from having a centralised open channel of communication where discussion happens and is referenceable. The “discussions in public” happen on Zulip, and the agenda of the “office hour regarding compiler development” is discussed in advance on… Zulip.
It is. Every link in the official Rust repository contributing guidelines and various contribution guide point to Zulip, every discussion about planning for meetings of any of the official Rust teams (language, compiler, cargo, standard library…) officially happens on Zulip in the open, and most RFCs end up referencing a link for history and justification. Yes, there is a discord and probably a billion other small channels and sub-community (e.g. Rust London). But these are not the center of the Rust ecosystem, Zulip is.
Also, the Rust discord is shutting down (though, again, I am not advocating for this on the OCaml side at all, this is happening because of scalability issues which we won’t suffer from – but it does confirm that the community is centred around Zulip):
Currently, the OCaml communication model is more unclear. I usually ask my questions here, but constantly feel like I’m spamming, because a forum is not quite adapted to this kind of discussion.
Though, I opened the OCaml Labs Slack today, I had uninstalled Slack, and it seems inactive. That being said, at least two of the channels I am a part of about core components of the ecosystem (VSCode plugin and Github Action) are private channels within an already-private slack… So it’s fair to say that, although progress has been made recently, the OCaml ecosystem doesn’t have a strong history of openness).
Again, I don’t care specifically about Zulip (I even don’t really like Zulip that much, I’m a bit mad at their desktop app), but it happens to have the features that make this model work.
Finally, and for the last time also, I would like to emphasize that in no way am I trying to criticize the OCaml core team(s). OCaml is a fantastic language, and I am repeatedly in awe of this too small pool of people doing such an amazing work for every one of us. It is beyond unreasonable to have such a good language and tools given the amount of people actually doing things. I am deeply thankful. I am simply trying to convince of something I believe would improve the ecosystem.