Japan has RubyKaigi and some other great conferences already. Europe still has a few, but nowhere near as many as the old days. Lots of great European developers who are still into Rails though, so the alternation feels like a good compromise.
Is RailsConf attendance declining enough to sunset the conference?
* Thinking they held all the cards, RailsConf uninvited DHH from the conference in 2022. They would never admit this, but the reasons were extremely petty, and all due to Ruby Central's (organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf) hyperpartisan nature. For example, DHH dared to suggest the audacious policy of "no politics at work" during a year where extreme politicization ran rampant. This may sound like an exaggeration, and I wish it were, but it's not.
* In 2023, the first Rails World was held in Amsterdam, organized by a new entity called the Rails Foundation (created by DHH and a number of other pioneers). It was a vastly better conference. By this time, RailsConf had all but eliminated their technical track in favor of "soft" subject matter. Amenities like coffee were only available during a tight ~30 minute window in the morning. The food was awful. And this despite tickets not being cheap. At Rails World by contrast, the talks were world class, the company/community excellent, and the snacks/food/amenities plentiful and top tier.
* Rails World was a smash success while RailsConf 2023 was unambiguously, not. One sold out in <10 minutes, the other was sparsely attended at best. Sponsors started moving.
* The same pattern repeated in 2024, except worse. While Rails World 2023 has been a pilot even with relatively few attendees, far more tickets were allowed for 2024, and even with the additional capacity, it still sold out in minutes. Not only was DHH keynoting, but all talks and the event itself were of the highest possible quality bar.
Meanwhile, Ruby Central was making some very poor financial decisions. For example, they reportedly gave up a ~half million dollar deposit on a Texas venue for 2023 so they could move the conference to San Diego. Once again, for political reasons (in their world view, Texas = evil, despite some the organizers themselves choosing to live there).
With the trend lines moving in all the wrong directions, there was no way that RailsConf was going to survive much longer anyway, so they decided to call it quits for 2025.
Obviously, RubyCentral had made their 2022 decision to uninvite DHH banking on him not deciding to start his own conference, but he did, and it turned out that he held all the cards, not them. There was a lot of unnecessary strife involved in the whole process, but in the end, the Rails community has landed in a much better place.
But if there is one thing I want to add is how good the Rails Foundation is being run. Amanda Perino is insanely great. Money is actually being spent on Marketing and Tutorial as well as documentation. More value output per dollar, which in turns means more sponsor willing to invest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35686266 shows one of the organizers belittling Dave and accusing him of causing the drama (https://web.archive.org/web/20230424072347/https://chelseatr...) which the organizer then watered down after backlash.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835261 shows a moderator of /r/rails rewriting history, implying Dave not going to RailsConf 2022 was Dave's fault, along with airing bizarre grievances like "We inserted snark at DHH in a Rails release candidate."
If I was deciding to attend a conference, I would 100% prefer to attend one where DHH and other pioneers are organizing/speaking. And also one that had more meat rather than the "softer" topics as you suggested.
And I 100% agreed with their "No politics at work" stance.
I had a policy in our company against discussing politics. I used to say some variation of "We provide products & services to our clients, and they pay us money to do so. Our politics or our clients' politics don't matter." (And it was easy to make this statement because there was no chance of our product being used by authoritarians or something, we were building software for COVID response).
So we had a hard rule that there would be no political discussions on company "property" (company slack, company emails, etc), exactly what 37signals had. If you want to text each other personally, go right ahead.
Nobody seemed to have an issue with it.
So in a nutshell, sounds like the personal political views (and attitude of partisanship) of the organizers ruined the conference.
