Annual Review: State of AsyncAPI Initiative 2023

Thulisile Sibanda

Thulisile Sibanda

·5 min read

It's almost unbelievable that we are in 2024. And if you are reading this, Happy New Year to you and your loved ones. Continuing the tradition, we look at how the community has grown over the last 365 days and look forward to our next phase.

If you are curious about our past achievements, please read the previous 2022 AsyncAPI summary.

Community Metrics

What better way to reflect on the past year than with numbers? Data is the most significant way to gauge our growth and measure our visible impact as an open-source community.

Slack

As of 2024, we are currently at an overall total of 4,471 members in the AsyncAPI workspace. The Slack workspace is our primary communication medium, from updates to helping contributors and new adopters onboard with the AsyncAPI spec and tools.

In 2023, we had 1488 people joining our workspace:

Below are our top 5 members who joined the community in 2023 and have been the most active among other newcomers. As a community, we are proud of their contributions to our Mentorship programs. They even keep us entertained with memes 😀.

Additionally, our weekly activity continues to grow as we run different mentorship programs and initiatives that bring traction to our community.

Social Media

We use social media to communicate news and updates around our community. We don't use it for marketing.

And honestly, I didn't invest much when it came to socials, so don't expect big big numbers 😝

Let's dive into the data:

LinkedIn

For our LinkedIn page, we are currently sitting at 2988 overall followers. During 2023, we gained a total of 849 followers since 2022.

We also don't use any premium or marketing services; everything you see here is 100% organic. Even though LinkedIn still has much to offer, it is better than the X/Twitter app.

X/Twitter

We gained almost 1K followers since 2022, and now have 4.4k overall followers. When it comes to website referrals via Twitter, we have seen a decline compared to last year, 2022

Although the decline is shallow, I'm not extremely worried. Most top tweets for this year were appreciation tweets balanced with technical tweets. We don't use advertising because we don't consider the X/Twitter platform worth additional investment.

YouTube

The AsyncAPI YouTube channel performed way better than expected, especially as we moved from online to in-person conferences. We currently have over 364 people subscribed to our channel, increasing total subscribers to over 1.46k. Our live streams and conference recordings bring in a lot of views, leaving us optimistic for 2024.

Newsletter

On the 5th of April, 2023, we sent out our first AsyncAPI Community Updates Newsletter. The main aim was to summarize monthly community activities/initiatives straight to your inbox. Over the past nine months, the December Edition was the most popular due to the release of the AsyncAPI v3 (one of our major accomplishments in 2023).

And, of course, I'm not exempt from unsubscribers. Although the number might seem minimal to some, it still stings as a writer.

Looking forward to sending the 2024 Editions!!🎉🎉

Google Analytics

AsyncAPI website sessions and unique user have increased significantly over the past year. Our major contributor to these metrics comes from docs, and we expect to see more in the coming year as people want to know more about the AsyncAPI v3.

We also lost 21 days' worth of data during October due to a PR update that affected the analytics workflow, but we are doing well.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of my favorite tools as it shows how much impact and interest we are gaining. Compared to 2022, we can see a surge in impressions and clicks.

Github

The number of contributors in the community keeps growing, from having over 1600 contributors in 2022 to 2320 contributors in 2023.

Although we have a handful of maintainers, we try our best to manage, resolve, and close issues as much as we can. Additionally, we are focusing on growing the number of maintainers in the coming years.

NPM

Numbers don't lie; and yes, these are the total downloads of the top AsyncAPI packages hosted in the Node Package Manager. We can also see the adoption of AsyncAPI spec downloads increased from 5M to 17M since 2022.

If you are worried about the project slowing down anytime soon, we are still growing strong.

Community Achievements

We achieved so much this year, and here are some of the highlights from the AsyncAPI community in 2023!

We hope you enjoyed a glimpse into our 2023 highlights; we have even more planned for 2024! Learn about our 2024 AsyncAPI Community Building Goals.