Ember is less frequently mentioned outside the Ember world every day, or is listed as “historically relevant” (Hannah, January 2018). Although quite funny, the following two tweets depict pretty well what Ember’s situation looks like:

There is a steep difference between what Ember’s community thinks of itself and how it is perceived from the outside. Ember has contributed several essential notions to shape what today we understand as front-end development. However, its popularity is shrinking and its innovations are often disregarded.

Why?

The aim of this article is to start a — hopefully fruitful — dialogue in Ember’s community, and perhaps contribute to our understanding of the JavaScript ecosystem. My argument through the article is that technical reasons are not enough to determine a framework’s growth or success. Below I elaborate on some possible factors that might explain part of the problem.

Not enough leaders

The venue was cozy and vibrating with Ember enthusiasts. It was my first time in a big Ember conference. It was amazing to meet in-person with so many people that I somehow see and follow online. I tried to keep my cool, but I was honestly very excited. “The revolution will not be centralized” was the title of Edward Faulkner’s talk. I had high hopes: are we gonna hear about Ember’s overall direction? I was expecting some sort of refreshing talk, but instead got a sales pitch for his project, Cardstack. Funny enough, such product proposes the use of vertical integration through a single vendor: the exact opposite of decentralization. It’s actually just another example of platform capitalism.

But, why was I expecting more from this talk? Perhaps because it was Edward Faulkner, a core team member. After all, in 10 major Ember events in the past few years, he spoke in 5.

In fact, 50% of the 188 talks in these events have been given by 29 people. The top 18 speakers gave 38% of all the talks.