[zubi]

The article nicely points out that the decline of Volapük is connected to reform attempts that originated from within. It also mentions that Esperanto had similar issues and some people went ahead to create a derivative language Ido. What it doesn't mention is that why Esperanto continued evolving while Volapük fell apart. One reason usually attributed to its longevity is that Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, became aware of human tendency to "improve" or reform constructed languages and saw it's been happening to Volapük. So he simply added into the Esperanto manifesto that the rules of Esperanto are "untouchable". So, he stated, that if you attempt to change parts of the language, you cannot call it Esperanto any longer, in an attempt to prevent diversion from the common roots of it.

[psychoslave]

I bet like you that this have been a strong factor, although other things like how its community structured into associations, organizing yearly gathering (when possible) and maybe the amount of available literature/songs certainly all plaid a role.

Also, what you point is not the whole light about Zamenhof and Esperanto reform attempts: at some point he did try to (reluctantly) bring some reform himself, but it was rejected by the community[1]. And this was only 6 years after Esperanto was released into the wild.

I can’t help but think about how tab was frozen into Makefiles "a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base"[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto [2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/20292/why...