When I compared Elixir/Phoenix vs Ruby/Rails to build a web application a few years back, I ultimately stopped using Elixir because the third party libraries superficially seemed to be more immature and not as well maintained.

Most semi-popular RubyGems are in v1.0+, have contributions and bug fixes within the past few months, and have a feeling of community around them. There’s even huge companies like GitHub, Shopify, and Basecamp behind some libs.

Elixir mix packages felt abandoned. Most were in the low digits 0.0.x, no commits for over 6 months, and the docs seemed to have a lot of notes in them that it’s early, not maintained, don’t use in production, etc.

Has this changed recently? Can anybody speak to why the Elixir ecosystem feels more empty?

That being said, my company has been using Elixir/Phoenix for three years and while many times there isn't a library for Elixir, often times there is already a stable Erlang library we can use.

https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir is a great source.

We have also changed our habit from looking for third-party libraries to either building our own module which we discovered they are fairly easier to build than we thought, or coming up with alternate solutions that built on top of the powerful Elixir/Erlang technology (e.g. OTP).