This message was sent in a private chat consisting communities leaders listed here
He literally spoke out the current state of this chat. Yes, we might come up with ideas and try to (sorta) exchange with experiences. In the end, it’s just only a few communities that are profiting from this chat.
We all came here, because ALL of US wanted something or somehow profit from being together for the sake of our own communities.
Personally, I came here in desire to continue my long standing community mission, the UDC (Uzbek Developer Consortium) which I couldn’t make it come true due to not being able to allocate enough time. UDC is all about standardizing everything all over Uzbek communities and I think this exact chat can be more useful if this thing was implemented for all of its members.
You see, the way communities work in Uzbekistan is, they just create or adopt existing rules and ethics whether how they gonna function and maintain this in a long run by doing some modifications in need. That’s just classic way of governing a community. Every community represents different systems. The thing is, diversity is good, but it might lead to confusion for many developers or community members, especially for beginners who are just getting started in community things.
For this exact reason, I decided to do an experiment and took all communities belonging to Mad Maids and created telegram bots for each community with community mods and we used the same rules, group structure and even manager bot codebase (except channel names and amount).
We did survey and out of 800 members (821 members to be exact) we got approximately 324 responses.
Many community members (roughly 216 people) reported that, they could just switch around communities without any hustle and know where and what to chat. Also, moderators (14 out of 25) said that they profited from this accordingly by warning/banning less amount of people compared to old community structure.
By centralizing group manager by using single codebase, it was way easier to manage multiple communities simultaneously as mods needed to only memorize commands one time instead of learning 100s of various group managers for every chat (sometimes groups may use the same one). However, we also added for every community their own addition to the manager bot that was specific to this community. Let’s say, at Rust community, using inline functionality, you could search Crates from Rust registry and in Linux community, you can use inline to lookup Arch Linux & AUR packages.
By implementing these, we grew our audience 3x compared to its old state and 2x compared to competitors.
Also, there is a perfect living example created by Indian dev community. You may have heard about them probably and they were pretty trendy in 2020s. Yes, I’m talking about "The Devs Network" at https://thedevs.network.
The way they centralized communities is, they just created a single bot that anyone could add to their group and become a part of this network by letting the bot manage their community. Buuuuut, it was pity that not all Indian dev community used telegram whereas some part of dev community maintained self hosted matrix servers or just got enough with IRCs. Lucky for us, in Uzbekistan, telegram is a whole internet and we can make this come true.
Even if a single regulation is not accepted by all communities in this chat, at least we can build a foundation that all community can rely on such as: must have foundational rules, bot implementations or traits.
In 2024, 26th November, we came across a benchmark published by MDC (Microsoft Dotnet Community) that was performed by Dotnet developers themselves and published on GitHub to which I personally reacted in my channel. At the beginning, we tried to ask benchmark source code from MDC community leaders, to which were answered with a post published by dotnet devs without even mentioning source code. After doing some rabbit hole exploration, I came across a repo on dotnet's official organization which was later deleted due to huge criticizm. When I checked the source code whether how they implemented servers for every ecosystem, I was shocked looking at how they poorly managed other ecosystems. You may find a few comparison screenshots in my channel. As you can see, they were literally utilizing the most from system by enabling every single feature on dotnet side whereas giving very little for Rust, C++ and other ecosystems which looked obviously suspicious. Even though, Rust and C++ managed to loose to dotnet only for a few strats which was humiliating for dotnet.
I couldn't blame MDC community leaders for this as they weren't aware of what was going on at Dotnet Core Devs side and how they were benchmarking. Therefore, I decided to step in and start standartization which was later abandoned due to lack of time for maintanance.
It has become pretty common where developers share with their unbiased opinions which are comparative and falsy most of the time. For example, if you visit dotnet community, community members will state that without a doubt, Dotnet is the best for any case, but they won't mention any issues with dotnet's ecosystem or cons side of it. The same goes for every uzbek dev community in existence like python, nodejs, just to name a few. I personally visited more than hundreds of uzbek communities and every time was disappointed with their statements.
My solution was that, all tech communities would come to an agreement and provide personal benchmark codebases for various cases, not only one! It should utilize most from machine and can include even optimizations, but interops being prohibited on other side. Third party side would conduct every benchmark and publish results on public repository and all tech communities will use this benchmark results as a reference to technical specifications of proper tech and decsribe its pros and cons.
This way, juniors, beginners, intermediate or even seniors would clearly see and be able to differentiate "what X is better in Y case".
I guess, they wanna move everything to Linkedin and kill communities.