HN for discussions that are not as mean as elsewhere on the Internet, I rather like this community and there's people with lots of experience and cool stuff to share here.
Mastodon for a comfy alternative to Twitter/X (feels less algorithmic, less ads), maybe Bluesky could serve a similar function.
Discord or WhatsApp for chatting with friends, and also the sort of discussions that you would have had on forums back in the day (vs the shorter form content of Mastodon/Bluesky). I have to say that I dislike people replacing forums for various technologies with Discord though, since I feel like something like Discourse/phpBB/whatever would be a better fit, more easily searchable etc., just felt like mentioning that.
Reddit or YouTube for seeing what's going on in the world, as well as any number of niche communities. For example, there's one about PC building, there's even one for Intel Arc GPUs, there's a lot of communities.
Slack, Skype (the meetings are better than Zoom) or maybe eventually Mattermost/Jitsi for chatting with people at work.
Now, it's not as much of a community as it is a news site, but LSM for some local reporting in my country: https://eng.lsm.lv/ which doesn't seem to have too much clickbait or the rude comments you get on most of the sites in my country, e.g. instead there's stuff like this https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/transport/11.01.2025-be-l... I'm sure that most countries have some down to earth news sites too.
Reddit and Discord. I dislike how difficult is to find valuable information now because communities on discord are locked in custom tech.
In the past I was active on some online forums for moto enthusiasts, gaming and news but this time is gone sadly. Now I try to minimise time spent online.
Curated corner of Mastodon.
Open-source projects use Zulip/Discord/Matrix as forums so I go there as well.
Others like sub-Reddits, HN or blogs I access mostly through RSS feeds. (With occasional exceptions like now.)
For surface-level information/news there is huge overlap in those places. Many duplicates.
My 2025 resolution is to be less online.
I used to be on Instagram around 2010 till Facebook bought it and changed it from community to influencers-infested algorithms and ads - I have no time for that.
Well, I thought Reddit could be HN for other topics. I was wrong. It's mostly an echo chamber there, apart from the heavily moderated subs that normally start with r/Ask{Economists/Historians/Linguistics/etc}
It still has some use as a personal news feed, but most of the comments are worthless.
There's a few math and science subs that are a bit like StackOverflow back when that was still useful.
Mastodon and Bluesky and various Discourse forums.
Reluctantly on Reddit as the current activitypub alternatives don't feel quite right (emulating the chaos of Reddit).
Even more reluctantly on Linkedin, given that there is no real alternative for a decentralized open source "professional" network, which shows how early we are in this transition process.
A few forums and other than that the only community I’m part of—if you can call it a community—is people with blogs. I read what they write, post on my own, and interact with them privately via email.
I've found that some recruiters are posting roles instead of publishing roles. These are often more relevant than the suggestions I get from LinkedIn. Does that plug in allow specific filtering? Thanks
I use Reddit, but very cautiously. The echo chamber effect is so strong over there and critical thinkers are not exactly rewarded, so many subreddits develop beliefs that are completely contrary to what’s going on in the real world. It’s also heavily astroturfed, which makes the problem worse as disinformation is constantly being injected. Sticking to subreddits about cooking, coding, landscaping, etc is usually fine.
I see that no one has mentioned Discord yet. I use it occasionally, and I have quite a few themed spaces there. However, I can't say that I particularly enjoy it. I mostly just check in from time to time. Discord always feels like a place where I miss a true sense of "community", which is very hard for me to define.
IMHO discord has far too much "community". at best you want to learn about $coolThing and the server is dominated by a handful of terminally online folks. at worst there's rampant extremism and grooming which goes largely unchecked
also even the most benign discord servers are taking what used to be freely accessible (forums, hobby sites, fansites, etc) and walling the content into a proprietary system which demands your phone number, real IP, etc. it's slowly strangulating all other forms of internet community
The thing with Discord and Reddit is: using it means very little. The communities make or break it. For example, I play two games regularly: Wordfeud and Warcraft Rumble. For Wordfeud, I seek no community, I only play it with my mother and my wife. For Warcraft Rumble, I like to theorycraft for myself, but if I really am stuck that is one of the places I go to first. So I lurk there, which means I am a user. But I do not participate since I removed my Reddit account a while ago. Similar with Discord (I do have an account): I am member of quite some Discord communities but I almost exclusively lurk. Discord and Reddit are nothing special though, since their ToS are terrible (we own your data, here are some ads, we profile you). The only reason I am there is network effect and the signal to noise ratio regarding info is 'good enough'. You're not even allowed to use your own or a modified client though...
Why is "talk into a black hole" discord so popular? I'm a member of several discord severs, and they are just noise, or someone trying to project manage with Discord (which is a poor project manager) or whomever just assume you're there to work for them for free and they assign you work without asking.
HN for discussions that are not as mean as elsewhere on the Internet, I rather like this community and there's people with lots of experience and cool stuff to share here.
Mastodon for a comfy alternative to Twitter/X (feels less algorithmic, less ads), maybe Bluesky could serve a similar function.
Discord or WhatsApp for chatting with friends, and also the sort of discussions that you would have had on forums back in the day (vs the shorter form content of Mastodon/Bluesky). I have to say that I dislike people replacing forums for various technologies with Discord though, since I feel like something like Discourse/phpBB/whatever would be a better fit, more easily searchable etc., just felt like mentioning that.
Reddit or YouTube for seeing what's going on in the world, as well as any number of niche communities. For example, there's one about PC building, there's even one for Intel Arc GPUs, there's a lot of communities.
Slack, Skype (the meetings are better than Zoom) or maybe eventually Mattermost/Jitsi for chatting with people at work.
Now, it's not as much of a community as it is a news site, but LSM for some local reporting in my country: https://eng.lsm.lv/ which doesn't seem to have too much clickbait or the rude comments you get on most of the sites in my country, e.g. instead there's stuff like this https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/transport/11.01.2025-be-l... I'm sure that most countries have some down to earth news sites too.
I don't think any service that you listed can be called a "community"?
Yes, there are communities hosted on them, but they're just services.
Reddit and Discord. I dislike how difficult is to find valuable information now because communities on discord are locked in custom tech.
In the past I was active on some online forums for moto enthusiasts, gaming and news but this time is gone sadly. Now I try to minimise time spent online.
Bluesky. A lot of the devs that I followed on X have moved to that platform.
Curated corner of Mastodon. Open-source projects use Zulip/Discord/Matrix as forums so I go there as well. Others like sub-Reddits, HN or blogs I access mostly through RSS feeds. (With occasional exceptions like now.)
For surface-level information/news there is huge overlap in those places. Many duplicates. My 2025 resolution is to be less online.
I used to be on Instagram around 2010 till Facebook bought it and changed it from community to influencers-infested algorithms and ads - I have no time for that.
Well, I thought Reddit could be HN for other topics. I was wrong. It's mostly an echo chamber there, apart from the heavily moderated subs that normally start with r/Ask{Economists/Historians/Linguistics/etc}
It still has some use as a personal news feed, but most of the comments are worthless.
There's a few math and science subs that are a bit like StackOverflow back when that was still useful.
Lemmy caught traction and feels like the old intrnet sometimes.
i like lemmy. feels very small but not dead. it's nice
For someone new to lemmy and a tech-interested HN user, which communities I should subscribe to?
I filter by technology/english, click "explore" on a couple of servers and it greets me with:
- Mel Gibson something Nazi
- Epic CEO says Trump Trump
- Tencent Chinese something military
- Justice Trump 34 felonies
- Republicans sound eager
Not sure if I want to "explore" "technology" further.
Mastodon and Bluesky and various Discourse forums.
Reluctantly on Reddit as the current activitypub alternatives don't feel quite right (emulating the chaos of Reddit).
Even more reluctantly on Linkedin, given that there is no real alternative for a decentralized open source "professional" network, which shows how early we are in this transition process.
I use X/Twitter, I find it's quite good. Follow what you like and swap the feed to only display "Following".
A few forums and other than that the only community I’m part of—if you can call it a community—is people with blogs. I read what they write, post on my own, and interact with them privately via email.
Reddit. I used to be on X but I no longer am. LinkedIn, if that counts as a community... I see it mostly as a Rolodex
Regarding LinkedIn, It's quite the opposite for me. I use a Firefox plugin called "LinkedIn Feed Blocker" to avoid seeing what people post there.
I've found that some recruiters are posting roles instead of publishing roles. These are often more relevant than the suggestions I get from LinkedIn. Does that plug in allow specific filtering? Thanks
It seems like it's blocking 100% of the feed. It’s just not there at all :D
I use Reddit, but very cautiously. The echo chamber effect is so strong over there and critical thinkers are not exactly rewarded, so many subreddits develop beliefs that are completely contrary to what’s going on in the real world. It’s also heavily astroturfed, which makes the problem worse as disinformation is constantly being injected. Sticking to subreddits about cooking, coding, landscaping, etc is usually fine.
I see that no one has mentioned Discord yet. I use it occasionally, and I have quite a few themed spaces there. However, I can't say that I particularly enjoy it. I mostly just check in from time to time. Discord always feels like a place where I miss a true sense of "community", which is very hard for me to define.
IMHO discord has far too much "community". at best you want to learn about $coolThing and the server is dominated by a handful of terminally online folks. at worst there's rampant extremism and grooming which goes largely unchecked
also even the most benign discord servers are taking what used to be freely accessible (forums, hobby sites, fansites, etc) and walling the content into a proprietary system which demands your phone number, real IP, etc. it's slowly strangulating all other forms of internet community
This. Don't use discord if you have a choice.
The thing with Discord and Reddit is: using it means very little. The communities make or break it. For example, I play two games regularly: Wordfeud and Warcraft Rumble. For Wordfeud, I seek no community, I only play it with my mother and my wife. For Warcraft Rumble, I like to theorycraft for myself, but if I really am stuck that is one of the places I go to first. So I lurk there, which means I am a user. But I do not participate since I removed my Reddit account a while ago. Similar with Discord (I do have an account): I am member of quite some Discord communities but I almost exclusively lurk. Discord and Reddit are nothing special though, since their ToS are terrible (we own your data, here are some ads, we profile you). The only reason I am there is network effect and the signal to noise ratio regarding info is 'good enough'. You're not even allowed to use your own or a modified client though...
Why is "talk into a black hole" discord so popular? I'm a member of several discord severs, and they are just noise, or someone trying to project manage with Discord (which is a poor project manager) or whomever just assume you're there to work for them for free and they assign you work without asking.
Online communities? Primarily X and Github. Sometimes Reddit for my Finnish language learning resources.
Offline? I'm mostly fine with my current friends and family.
Gemini https://geminiprotocol.net/
Mastodon
Only me and a couple of my employees use it so far - https://www.rezi.ai/community/browse
https://lemmy.world/c/technology is pretty good.
- https://bearblog.dev/discover/
- http://www.metafilter.com/
- https://tildes.net/
- sometimes bsky
- discord servers of hobby and interest groups
- some facebook groups for niches have been quite good as well surprisingly
Why would one need more? HN can already be a massive time killer.
Yeah, for professional I also read lwn.net without discussing very frequently. For leisure/hobby I am in railway forums.
Trains!
Very similar to HN: https://lobste.rs/
Can someone give me an invite. I am in Europe and I don't know anyone who has an account to vouch for me
It's invite only? Huh, well that's that then.
I'm in a similar boat. Maybe Lobsters hasn't made headway across the Atlantic yet?
Ironic, since .rs is the TLD for the Republic of Serbia.
Got you an invite :)
They block Brave browser cos of some crypto beef.
But Brave has some dank ad-blocking fu. Hard to resist.
I used to use Kbin before it stopped working.
Kbin was just one instance out of the dozens of active servers.
New England Revolution fans forum.
Techno-club.net
mastodon
github
Mainly X, Reddit, and Discord for specific groups.
I only use X/Twitter, now that Elon is in charge and cleaned it up.