Joe Ferguson recently attended the Laracon US conference, a conference centered around the Laravel framework and the community that's around it. In this post to his site he shares some of his thoughts about the event and something else that came up during the course of the event - the topic of "silos" in communities.

When the [JeoPHPardy] game was over I was thinking about a lot of the questions that the contestants couldn’t answer and how that relates to this being a Laravel conference. (As opposed to a PHP conference). [...] The point I’d like to make is that a random sampling of Laravel conference attendees were unable to answer medium to high difficulty PHP related questions. [...] I find it frustrating that a random sampling of Laracon attendees seem to be out of touch with not only notable PHP podcast hosts, the Framework Interoperability Group that is guiding the way they write code, and inner workings of the PHP language itself.

He goes on to share his frustration with the "silo" that it seems like the Laravel community has created, making their interactions with the general PHP community somewhat less. He points out that he's not picking on Laravel, though. He shifts the focus away from complaints about the community differences and instead emphasizes bringing people out of these silos. He includes a few practical things that can help too: attending a conference, going to a more general PHP user group, etc.