What other communities do you use apart from HN?

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.

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.

Lemmy caught traction and feels like the old intrnet sometimes.

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.

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

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.