Is there a conference for everything nowadays? I mean with the digital conference it's not really going to happen, but didn't some companies declare bankruptcy because they kept pouring all their money and effort into conferences?
One of vim/neovim conferences (forgot which one) I was introduce to one of my favorite plugins: harpoon [1]. I would have never learned about this plugin if it wasn't for these types conferences.
If it's called VimConf, I could understand including content from anything vim related, even vi or neovim stuff (or from the other forks/variations/bases).
But if it's called NeovimConf, I wouldn't expect that to include the entire Vi ecosystem.
Apparently the neovim people are more chill about it.
What I was referring to was this plugin he made and gave a talk on in a past vim conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnos8aApa9g
Harpoon is really cool, especially if you only work with 3 to 4 files. The ability to switch files with two keys is extremely nice. It's just a very ergonomic and pleasant plugin to use.
A company I worked for had a whole division dedicated to inventing conferences around products or ideas that other companies wanted to promote. A great example are conferences where there are talks on cloud-based tools. The speakers don't just go up there and say "go buy compute from vendor X". Instead, everything is structured around how to use (often free) tools or techniques that ultimately require investment in "compute or storage from vendor X".
Another, more abstract, example is a conference on programming languages or frameworks. These are great places to push ideas about "the new way" or "the right way" to do something that happen to include something you're selling. I've seen conferences make attendees into low-level developer evangelists. Those people went back to their companies to endorse programming languages and architectures that had a lot of support from particular vendors, and the cycle was complete. It may seem a bit hand-wavy the way I've explained it, but I've seen it work.
My point is, conferences may cost a lot to put on but have quite a few obscured benefits that you have to price in when considering if they're worth it.
The problem is that anyone who'd benefit from it would want to run it.