Where do you browse and chat outside of here?

A little bit on TwitchTV, a little bit on Discord, and a little on Reddit, but, honestly, I feel pretty lonely on the Internet these days.

I've been on Reddit for over 15 years and yeah, it feels quite different than it did early on. I can't really stand browsing r/all or r/popular at all.

I miss the days of having 255 friends on AIM, trout slaps on well-populated mIRC channels, and never-ending threads on niche Ultimate Bulletin Board forums.

Bluesky has some good content if you curate your feeds and algorithm (it's fully customisable). Also spend a lot of time on Twitter but I don't recommend it.

Reddit can be okay if you choose the right niche subreddits -- stay away from the main page subreddits. Among the niche subreddits, I find location-based subreddits and subreddits for podcasts to be good sources for unique communities.

Many discord servers, each focusing on different interests. The communities are small enough that you can have actual conversations without a lot of noise. I just wish these communities were on a less centralized and less closed platform.

Reddit used to be great, but these days, it's mostly rage bait and state actors astroturfing all of the popular subreddits.

Mastodon and RSS feeds. I’m also trying to write more long form stuff, and that definitely helps keeping conversations going.

I check out Lemmy maybe once or twice a month.

Bluesky and a couple discord channels related to entomology and botany. I really like each at the moment. My usage is pretty limited, and the quality of time spent is really high. I feel like HN is the same. Since dropping Reddit and Twitter my internet usage has been a lot more positive.

I found the discord channels somewhat by chance. When you’re into specific things and ask a lot of questions, inevitably you’ll wind up meeting similar people.

As for Bluesky, I was just too burned out on Twitter and was willing to give something else a shot. My feed was initially a bunch of mycological photography, birding photography, far more moderate and constructive politics, and some lists of people in tech that I seeded my following list with. It was so much easier to read and engage with, and the transition was very natural. I’m glad I made the change.

Bluesky has led to discovering a few substacks that I enjoy a lot too. I definitely wouldn’t have found them on Twitter.

What do you mean when you say that Reddit is too mainstream for you?

I mostly read RSS feeds and hang out on Mastodon. I don't really chat anywhere anymore, not since I left the last IRC channel years ago. I occasionally miss it, but haven't found anything that comes close enough.

This question comes up from time to time, only to prove on each iteration there is nothing like HN.

My favourite is a private local slack group. It is a group of mainly software devs who chatted on public groups and dealt with a couple of trolling / bad behaviour situations, so we made a private invite only slack. It's really nice, it's super active compared to even much larger interest based chat groups I'm in. It's a safe place, it has about 60 members, I've met a lot of people in it in person. There are some other employees of the place I work on there, which is a little awkward because I'm a team lead and I goof off there a bit, but there are private channels (private within private!) for the core group.

Honestly, reddit. There is loads of garbage but some subreddits are just gold, like the data engineering subreddit.

Private Slack, WhatsApp and Signal groups are the most valuable to me.

In order of precedence.

0. Meatspace.

1. IRC, mostly on rizon and a bit on libera.

2. Imageboards that don't require accounts.

3. General web, via some shell scripts I've written that give me pseudorandom content from various aggregators.

4. HN

5. Discord, but it I try to avoid as much as possible for ideological reasons.

6. Public unix system micro-blogs/gopher-holes.

I am working on a slashdot alternative. Link is in my profile. I’m in no hurry to grow the user base really.

What I’m trying to do is understand the world a bit better and encourage civil discussion.

I’m building this without relying on the internet behemoths.

Constructive criticism welcome.

In my house and at friends houses, sometimes in cafes or the local maker space.

Mainly The Guardian and Mastodon

Other sites include 404Media, Wired, The Newyorker, BBC News.

Private Signal groups, and my own BBS: https://bbs.sneak.berlin.

Discord for online hobbies.

Real life (and associated group chats) for social interaction. Board game group, local motorcycling group, some other friends.

Bluesky Reddit ArsTechnica

Mastodon never catched on for me

The rest is local news or sports

I browse Australia and New Zealand tech topics on Scratch News Australia. https://scratchnews.io

Their Bluesky is weirdly entertaining to subscribe to. https://bsky.app/profile/scratchnews.io

For sorting the full throttle new Hacker News content, when browsing time is limited, I'm a big fan of https://hckrnews.com

I built https://hn-pm.me/ some time ago, it did not really catch on...

IRL

I don’t. This my go to.

Tildes and Lobste.rs. And I’m hopeful for the Digg revival to take off in the right direction.

Lobste.rs

Mostly lobste.rs, since it's more programming focussed than HN.

rdrama.net

Discord for specific hobbies and groups.

Tildes, Lobste.rs and Lemmy for generic content

Mastodon and BlueSky for more personal things.