Where else on the web does everyone hang out?
Where else on the web does everyone hang out?
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?
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)
37Honestly, I read more, do more gardening, play more videogames. Kinda a weird benefit, but I joined two book clubs and a walking group. Started going to a parenting group on Sundays so my kiddo and I are making more friends. I guess reddit just pissed me off enough to go out and be more in my community. It's kinda nice.
23Reddit (only subs related to living in Japan since those didn't migrate here), kbin/lemmy, fark (though I almost never comment anymore), and an old-fashioned forum/bulletin board (more stuff related to living in Japan).
Edit: and I guess YouTube? 99% of the time, I'm watching from my TV which doesn't have comments or anything.
14Off the internet, on my intranet, and if possible, IRL. Most of my internet usage is checking specific YouTube channels like an RSS feed, which barely takes time or effort. Keep a tab on weekly top posts of headphones, datahoarder, piracy and VPNTorrents on Reddit. Rest is on Lemmy, trying to create engagement and moderate privacy and technology subs. Keep a monthly tab on data compression and archival. Updating my Brain.exe knowledge base is easy, passive and quick.
Truth be told, I am getting tired of the internet itself, as I get old. Always feels like I have seen it all, repetitive discussions, same comment chain jokes, tech or entertainment is no longer progressing enough for it to be worth to keep up with the snail speed. That is what happens when you are on the internet for 2 decades, during the Golden Age around 2007, post Golden Age and now into the death of the internet and its backbones. The soon to come change of international geopolitical dynamics with a split between west and rest of world, happening in parallel to distrust and disengagement with Big Tech fueling the growth of Fediverse, just means that we will no longer be a "global" community, going back to either small federated networks or our own good old walled off forum villages/kingdoms.
14Hacker News, mainly.
Sometimes I log on to Reddit to help travelers to my country or hobbyists trying to learn engineering. I try to avoid discussion on Reddit as the quality is often not high, e.g. lots of tourists asking how to commit crimes in my country -- better to just not answer.
For discussion I go here, it's much more interesting.
IRC has always been pretty cool. I might go back to that one day. For now this is just the part of my life where I try to make money and don't have much time to socialize.
14If it counts, I know a lot of people hang out on VR chat. It's a very common misnomer that you need a VR to run the platform, most of my friends don't even bother being in VR they just use it in desktop mode. I expect you probably meant more text-based, but I wanted to throw that on the board as well
8My routine is, in this order, Lemmy, Mastodon, Tumblr
7Discord and the osrs grand exchange w390 or dustbowl tf2
5TV Tropes is absolutely packed if you ever want to join.
5The only other forum I participate in is Arstecknica.
5YCombinator's HackerNews mostly.
5Even though I'm technically not hanging out with people, I like to occasionally look through some of the different sites on Neocities to see what cool things people have made.
5According to my Android phone:
Sync for Lemmy in second or first place most of the time, same for Telegram.
A bit of Discord and Sync for Reddit too.
Firefox random searches.
A bit of Meta apps (almost zero use of Instagram, but it vary with Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, usually FB is the winner).
Feeder and Feedly at the very last (I get my tech news right here).
YouTube I use it a lot, not on mobile but my Shield TV
5This is it. And board game geek. And discord.
5Lemmy 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.
4Well...
4Discord 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.
4Mastodon mostly
4Mostly YouTube, Hacker News, and some mailing lists. I do join some random forums to discuss non-tech hobbies like English writings, games, or classical music.
4cohost, tildes, lobste.rs, rss feed reader
2Lemmy, Matrix and Piped.
2Lemmy, discord and occasionally VRChat
1Lemmy, GitHub, Hacker News, a number of blogs in my RSS reader of choice (Reeder).
1I 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
1As 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.
1Mastodon, some discord and irl.
1