I’m really curious where else everyone here hangs out on the internet besides Lemmy.
I myself am frequently on discord with my wife and friends playing games. I’ve also found myself in and around smaller blogs spaces like Kev Quirk and related people. Reddit used to be a place for me to hang out but I never found a community that I felt connected to. I don’t know if YouTube would be considered a place to hang out, but I frequently spend way more time there than I should. IRC used to be a great place for me.
So, where are your favorite places?
Discord for games with friends, and for a couple niche pieces of software too small for forums.
Lemmy for broad-appeal topics like world news and less niche tech.
And Im not sure if it still counts when I just lurk now, but Reddit for everything else, since none of it moved over to lemmy. Gaming subreddits, more niche tech, history and accedemic topics, local and lifestyle stuff, ect.
cohost, tildes, lobste.rs, rss feed reader
Just checked out cohost. Looks cool and thanks for the tip.
Lemmy, GitHub, Hacker News, a number of blogs in my RSS reader of choice (Reeder).
I’m still on IRC! There’s a raw simplicity to it that I appreciate. You don’t have to use a bloated Electron app to connect to a proprietary service, you can just go straight text on the protocol-level in terminal (if you’re nuts), and the protocol is open and simple enough to understand that you can easily make your own client even if you’re a lazy or mediocre dev.
So IRC, Lemmy, and I guess Instagram (if that counts)
Yeah it’s feels really nice. I’m not on it now but I remember loving the feeling of it because it’s not fucking big tech shit.
Cool, Im going to see how I can sell ad space irc channels this week and then sell it.
Follow-up question: Are there any IRC channels where people don’t just talk about compiling their favorite IRC client on their favorite linux distro?
I second this question! I’d like to know some good servers with healthy communities.
Sad. Guess we just have to go through them
Sorry–it was sarcasm.
Here and YouTube via revanced while it lasts.
I check insta occasionally. I also have an artist profile for insta so it’s a double whammy. Still spend less than 5 mins there though.
Everywhere else sucks rn.
If you have an apple machine you can use freetube as well :)
When you say while it lasts, what do you mean?
I think some of us are intentionally avoiding big tech now and try to find places online that doesn’t feel completely dead soul wise.
Lemmy feels good for me, but I’m also looking for web sites where I feel connected to people.
I know some websites with single moms looking for connections…
Already found my girl. :)
I’ve found that small blogs are excellent for this. I started my own and reached out to a few smaller blogs from some really interesting people. I instantly felt at home in the community.
Thanks, yes, I guess it’s time to go back to following blogs and interacting with real people again on the web. Before big tech, that’s what the entire internet was. Just lots of original web sites from individuals wanting to show their web design skills or talking about random topics.
It just feels like it’s harder to find those now, and also a bit inconvenient to remember to go to each site every now and then. We got lazy with centralized services, with everything under one centralized controlled roof owned by an insane billionaire with mommy issues.
An RSS reader is the ideal tool for that. No need to remember to go to every site when all of them are in one place. And most blogs have an RSS feed as well.
I use a service called Inoreader. It’s an RSS reader that can be used on the browser, iOS and android. The free version allows you like 150 feeds or something like that with a lot of functionality. There’s really no reason to buy the service.
You just either search the blog in the inoreader search bar. Or, in the case of smaller blogs (which is where I like to spend most of my time), you just look for a link to their RSS feed somewhere on the website. Below is a screenshot of what an example RSS feed link looks like.
Often, if an rss link isn’t on the page, there’s still a feed available. /rss and /feed are the most common places to find it.
Discord and the osrs grand exchange w390 or dustbowl tf2
I like Mastodon, but I gotta say, Lemmy has basically taken over as my go to boredom relief app. When I’m not on Lemmy, I’m probably on YouTube.
Then there’s work: GitHub and email.
And play: Steam.
I don’t get the whole twitter-like microblogging thing. Mastodon feels kind of strange to me because it’s similar to that. I try to find a cool place to hang out there, but it always feels like a waste. But YouTube… the amount of time I give YouTube… lol
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As far as socializing, Lemmy is pretty much the big one nowadays.
Well, a little Facebook too, to stay in touch with friends and family, but I use F. B. Purity to remove ads and other features I don’t use on Facebook (gaming, marketplace, reels/stories, etc.), plus an extension in Firefox to block Facebook/Instagram from snooping on my other browser tabs. Don’t want them building a profile on my browsing habits to customize ads for me, or to sell to third parties.
I also use Discord with my wife and a few close friends, so we can arrange an online video gaming night once or twice a week, and stay in touch the rest of the time.
Before Lemmy, I used Reddit a ton. Before that, I was a moderator for a forum called CommGuys.net (formerly 3C0X1.net), which was a forum for Air Force service members in the IT career field. The former site URL was our Air Force specialty code that designated the generic IT career field, but it changed in 2009, splitting into several different codes for different specialties, so they changed the site to CommGuys; short for Communications Guys, which is what they used to call IT professionals in the Air Force. Nowadays, they call them Cyber Guys, because we’re more cyber/web focused and less communications specific. But when social media sites were officially unblocked from Air Force computer networks in 2010, military people ran over to Reddit and Facebook and our forums practically died out, so the site owner finally shut it down.
Oh, and to officially date myself, my first social media platform was MySpace, which I didn’t even get involved in until after I left home and joined the military. Social media was not a thing in my childhood, and most of my childhood was without Internet. It didn’t become popular/commonplace until my preteen years, and content was sparse for many years after that. I did use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN Messenger, ICQ, and a couple others in my teen years, but that was basically direct messaging with friends through the Internet before everyone had cell phones.
Even as a teen/young adult, IRC was more of an “old nerdy IT guy” hangout spot, so I rarely got involved with it, despite joining the IT profession in the military. I expected it to die out as more advanced web functionality approached, but I guess some people really like the classics, and it’s surprisingly still a thing today.
Oh, and 4chan was a great site back in its early days, but then too many young kids started joining it and taking the “free speech” jokes seriously, so now it’s become a breeding ground for fascist misogynistic alt-right extremists. We used to joke around about that stuff, testing the mods to see what our censor limits were, since 4chan liked to advertise itself as the only place on the Internet where you could speak your mind without being silenced or banned. And, well… some people really pushed those boundaries to the extreme and eventually turned the site into a cesspool.
I used to get on 4chan about 13 years ago. From my experience, it was a cesspool even way back then—but mostly on random. There were some other communities that were really cool. I kind of wish that was still a thing
XMPP MUCs, IRC, some Matrix Spaces. Lobsters, Mastodon.
I refuse Discord. I really wish I could refuse Microsoft GitHub—source code doesn’t need to be a proprietary social media plaform.
if it isn’t for work related stuff, there are some self hosted github alternatives like gitlab, gitea and gogs
they might have less features tho
Oh I don’t use Microsoft GitHub for almost anything personal, but some language ecosystems only allow packages on the platform …& the issues, discussions, pull request model has lock-in to where you can’t submit a bug, propose a new idea, or even submit a patch unless the maintainer set up something third-party. Due to so many projects with lock-in, to generally participate in free software you must have an account.
Those alternatives are good, and they are more than feature complete. I sometimes choose alternative DVCS for non-work stuff as well. Can’t be forced or forked to Microsoft GitHub if you are not using Git. 🫡
I mean federating is nice, but honestly a lot of the social features need to go
This is it. And board game geek. And discord.
Primarily mastodon. Really enjoying that.
Facebook for relatives & friends from the real world.
I find the Mastodon/Threads/Twitter medium to be kind of hard to love sometimes. You must have found a great community! Where/who do you interact with on Mastodon?
Retrocomputing, film & art crowds.
I’ve been posting a lot of silent film stuff recently.
On the big instances or some niche ones?
hachyderm. Medium-big?
Lemmy is my go to when I have downtime and want to mindlessly scroll but I’ve been really into making things lately so I’ve been on GitHub for fun trying to understand how other projects work.
