Where does the flutter community hang out?
Clearly flutter is starting to catch on. Online communities are critical these days to see what fellow developers are saying, ask for guidance, or even get tech support to get unblocked on specific problems.
So, where does community hang out? It turns, the answer is everywhere and nowhere. Let’s take a look at some of the existing online communities.
The project homepage has a community page that provides links to some of these of these forums, and a few that I do not touch on here.
pub.dartlang
- Used for: sharing flutter and dart packages
- Used by: the community and flutter devs
- My Take: need some functionality? start here
pub.dartlang.org is the official site for the community to share packages. It should be your first port of call if you suspect that you are working on a hard problem that perhaps has been solved before. The search feature is robust, the presentation let’s you decide quickly if a package has the functionality you want, and their are useful links to get you started and help you succeed.
The “ratings” are automated, but include a strong component of “popularity” which means that you can get a sense of which packages the community is adopting fastest.
flutterdev@
- Used for: announcements, and tech support
- Used by: core flutter devs and professional developers
- My Take: best place for the pulse of the project
The flutter dev mailing list is old school open source community. Discussions can be deep, top posting and inline comments rule. Official announcements are interleaved with calls for help and sometimes deep technical questions. Like any mailing list, turn around time for questions and answers is slow.
However the list tends to be very helpful, and sometimes questions are answered by core flutter devs. I get the sense that the users on the mailing list tend to be using Flutter in anger, and real paid profressional projects.
The list is still low traffic, receiving several postings a day, so it is worth subscribing to.
- Used for: official announcements, original content, random comments
- Used by: flutter project, anyone with something to say about flutter
- My Take: if you enjoy the noise
In fairness, I should note that I find both Twitter and Facebook to be terrible. I use them as little as possible. Take this section and the next with a grain of salt.
The official flutter account is a useful stream of official flutter content and postings. If you want to have a pure feed of such content, this is probably the best place to get that.
The flutter hashtag is the stream of conciousness discussions and weirdness that you would expect from twitter. If it’s your thing, the community there seems realatively active.
I’m just leaving this here to say that I did not forget about Facebook, but, also, I didn’t try very hard. As far as I could tell, there are numerous Facebook pages and profiles dedicated to Flutter, but I needed to log into Facebook to see them, which I just won’t do. Perhaps I am missing out on something good, though.
- Used for: announcements and articles
- Used by: content creators
- My Take: daily source of news and articles
/r/flutterdev gets numerous postings a day. The posts tend to be links to articles and videos, many of which are produced by community members seeking to promote their blog posts, videos, and other content. Official content from the flutter team is also posted there a few times a week.
This subreddit is a great way to see what your fellow community members are working on. The posts tend to be light on discussion, though, so it isn’t the first place to go if you are looking for interaction.
Google Plus
- Used for: announcements and articles
- Used by: content creators
- My Take: quiet, …. too quiet
The most populated Google Plus Group has not been particularly active in the last few weeks. The content seems to be similar in nature to the content fro Reddit, a combination of posting official Flutter announcements and videos along with content contributed by community members. However, the community does not seem to be thriving there, from the point of view of frequency of posts, at least.
StackOverflow
- Used for: Getting help
- Used by: The Google Index
- My Take: Everything that could be asked
The flutter Tag on Stack Overflow has well over 8,000 questions. If you do a web search for pretty much any flutter questions, there is a very high probability that you will end up on StackOverflow. The Q+A and ratings system does its job well of helping you find answers, and highly upvoted answers usually have code that you can copy and paste.
If your questions has not been asked before, the StackOverflow format is not conducive to immediate gratification. Expect some significant lag time between asking a question, and getting answer.
Slack
- Used for: I have no idea
- Used by: Community members
- My Take: quiet, …. too quiet
The project community page refers to a specific Slack server but, it is inivte only, and it’s not very clear how to secure an invite, or why one would want to do so. There are other Flutter related Slack servers, though.
FlutterDev seems to be dead, at least the #general channel.
Flutter-IO somewhat more active, but just barely. There does not seem to be any real interaction, at least not in the #general channel. Compared to Gitter and Discord, the Flutter Slack communities just have not taken hold.
Discord
- Used for: Interactive help
- Used by: Community
- My Take: Help and social connection
Discord is quite active. The nice thing about the Discord server is that the it is split into channels the way an active Slack server is. #beginner and #intermediate get many questions a day. The community there can be very interactive trying to help people solve their issues.
There are a few other useful channels, such as #general, #useful-resources, #collaborate, etc… All are fairly active, and comments and questions there tend to kick off interactivity.
The #promotion channel is a nice touch, allowing a place for blatant self-promotion in a community-friendly way. Similarly, #app-showcase gives a nice play for people to show off their work.
It does not appear that the paid Flutter Devs ever visit Discord, though.
Finally, Discord is the only community where I have made any semblence of social connection with the communit members. If a feeling of connection and mutual support is important to you, Discord is the leading Flutter community in my opinion. The Discord community reminds me a bit of freenode communities from 10 or so years ago.
Gitter
- Used for: Drive by tech support
- Used by: Community
- My Take: Most likely place to get an answer fast
Gitter seems to be the go to place for help in the flutter community, at least judging from the constant stream of questions and converation that happens there. This could be caused by every flutter topic being crammed into the same channel, though, and not broken up into separate channels.
It seems like many questions there get answered fast. I had a question about a corner case I was hitting related to cocoa pods. Someone on Gitter happened to know exactly the cause, and was able to tell me just what I needed to know to google a solution to my problem. On the other hand, I have seen questions get asked there that just get scrolled off into oblivion. If you don’t get an answer fast, you won’t get an answer.
There is one person that seems to be on Gitter at all times, and provides a lot of the interactivity, whereas Discord seems to have 4 or 5 fairly active participants.
Conclusion
I assume that there are community resources that I have missed here. After all, I never know what the cool kids are doing these days. And I skipped over sub communities, like “Docs” and such.
So where to Go?
Ask a Question
To get a question answered along with some friendly interactivey, go to Discord. If you want a high likelihood of getting a question answered and moving on, try Gitter.
News and Information
For tracking the state of the project, and following some deeper technical discussion, subscribe to the flutterdev mailing list. If you want to follow community producded content, then visit Reddit Daily.