Have you tried Meetups? If you are in a reasonably sized city, Meetups can be great (and free) to talk to linkminded devs using the same technologies, making contacts and maybe even finding business partners.
Plus, being in an obscure niche means nobody understands what you do, or much cares. Telephony ain’t sexy, and most specialised things that cater to very particular intra-industrial needs aren’t either. There is a small coterie of people in ATL with whom I can have fulfilling conversations about VoIP, and many of them are among my customers already. The chances of that happening at a generic business networking event are substantially zero.
So it’s not that one has literally nobody to talk to, anywhere. There just isn’t much of a support system given these two factors. It’s very rarefied, and one must develop a high tolerance for toiling in obscurity and the loneliness that comes with. Some developer types don’t mind that, I gather, but if you’re used to and generally enjoy working with humans, it’s really tough sometimes.
What few people understand is that a solo self-funded developer is not supposed to get tech things "right". That is a good way to run the business into the ground. Instead, the goal is to optimize cash flow by carefully balancing your time investment between technology and marketing.
The work I do for clients is always much higher quality from a purely technical perspective, but when you're solo and working on side projects, you optimize for a completely different set of variables (or fail).
Being a perfectionist and having no accountability and unbounded time to tinker on a side project and not release it or charge for it or market it is a recipe for disaster in my case. So now I try to do the shittiest first version that I can live with, and then revise as I go. It’s painful and stressful, but the money the projects make really helps :)
But yeah, I agree. So much advice out and Best Practices out there that only work if you've got a 10-person org and plenty of time to spare, as well as a clear ROI for gold-plating.