Where do you find a community?

Hello,

I have been experimenting with the thought of learning an accessible, 
reliable and concise scripting language and considered Groovy a worthy 
candidate. To decide whether this is the case, I started doing these 
little exercises online which usually spawns a lot of micro-questions 
that are hard to answer from the docs, no matter that they look alright. 
This is where we arrive at the elephant in the room with Groovy: the 
striking lack of living, interactive, low-barrier communities.

Groovy might not be a trendy language but it has plenty of visibility 
and stakeholders compared to what I was used to with Raku. The big 
difference is that Raku has a vivid IRC network, it has a Discord 
server, and in addition it also has a blog, a subreddit, a legacy 
mailing list, a Mastodon and so on.

Obviously I'm not running around investigating the communities of all 
sorts of niche languages but on Discord I've seen servers for languages 
from Pascal and Prolog to Factor and Uiua. The older languages usually 
have a dedicated IRC channel, some have both. There is also Zig with the 
principle of a distributed community which is to my understanding mostly 
about allowing and encouraging people to create spaces across various 
platforms, with a loose set of rules.

For Groovy, the only real-time platform would be the Slack - if Slack 
being a hassle wasn't enough, it's hidden behind a kind of survey that 
seems to serve some sort of gatekeeping. There is a semi-active 
subreddit and this mailing list. Grails stuff operates under similar 
terms, except half dead. It seems clear that this is not how you get 
people involved with the language in 2024 - honestly, not even having 
good old IRC with a bunch of available people really raises some 
questions.

Where is the Groovy community? Is there even one? Who are the target 
audience if there is one? Why is there no visible effort to make the 
language more accessible to newcomers, some place they could go and 
practice? Is it that the people running the business are running out of 
motivation or is this Apache project somehow uninterested in extending 
the user/contributor base, unlike most indie projects?

I am really curious about an answer because for me these are questions 
that determine both the practical feasibility to learn a language and 
the overall state and potential of a community.

Sincerely
Martin Burger