Elixir is actively used by Discord, ground zero for trannies, pedophiles and delusional freaks. I wouldn't consider that a niche. You could say that this is just the audience, not the ones making the product. Their error messages and the kinds of people you can encounter doing tech support don't exactly inspire confidence.
Eh, I'll argue that it really
is just the audience. One faggot user (even a prolific one) using your tool doesn't make you a faggot. Rust doesn't
just suck because its users are assholes -- its
governance is astonishingly pozzed and the language (and implementation) has a wide variety of technical deficiencies they have no interest in fixing.
Discord uses Elixir on the backend for the "boring" task of flinging millions of messages around between users and channels every second without tying up entire racks of computers to do it (Elixir and Erlang -- the guts of what Elixir builds upon -- are
very efficient with massive, scalable concurrency, especially for message passing, with minimal computing hardware compared to just about anything else).
They don't do anything visibly "sexy" with it (no UI, web stuff, etc.). There's no "twitter cred" to glean from posting cutesy things about it and not much social media interest in it. In fact there's probably just one sad, frustrated and lonely straight guy on the Discord team with the competence to maintain the Elixir codebase they all depend on. Trannies won't touch it -- actually groking the language isn't a task you can achieve over a weekend at a Starbucks and nobody will cheer for you when you brag online about attempting it.
The two languages also still have governance bodies that aren't contaminated. They're very "old-school" communities, with a lot of the original Ericson-era people still hanging around in the Erlang ecosystem. Elixir is more recent and probably has a somewhat more "casual" community (especially with people comparing the Phoenix+Elixir stack favorably to Ruby on Rails) but still has sane, stable governance, as best as I can tell anyway. A good number of the "old hat" Erlang crowd is involved in Elixir too.
