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?

Veraxus,
Veraxus avatar

Ever since Reddit killed itself, the only places I really lurk are Kbin (and therefore Lemmy by proxy) and Discord. That's pretty much it.

Synthead,

Reddit is doing great, actually

be_excellent_to_each_other,
be_excellent_to_each_other avatar

Maybe (though this is not the description I typically see about reddit these days) but a great many of us are here because we refuse to be there.

be_excellent_to_each_other,
be_excellent_to_each_other avatar

I have ignored Discord for years until recently. It just seems like IRC with a lot of flashiness and emojis. Is there more to this experience? I don't intend to be disparaging, but I looked for some specific topic servers and just found the quality of discussion to be low and the experience to be chaotic.

I'm willing to be told I'm doing it wrong though - is there a "here's the right way to get into discord" approach I'm missing?

Veraxus,
Veraxus avatar

There are a lot of game development communities there. It’s basically a cheap, more public alternative to Slack.

DougHolland,
@DougHolland@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t even get past the user interface at Discord. Rarely have I felt so uninvited to participate, even as the site aggressively invites me to participate.

Admetus,

Yeah seems so, it’s pretty ok though. It tracks what is new and your mentions so it’s vaguely like a messaging app instead of IRC.

amitten,

I personally think the best way to use discord is to create a server and invite people to it as you meet them online. For me, it’s gaming that connects me with people. My wife and I meet people that we like and want to play with more, and so we invite them. This usually results in getting invited to other small community servers.

TeaHands,
@TeaHands@lemmy.world avatar

Discord shines when you use it with a tight-knit group. A RL friend group, a gaming clan, etc.

But there are a ton of these big public servers that are essentially just spam, because that’s what happens when you collect a load of random people in one place who have one minor interest in common at best, and then try and get them to hang out socially.

It’s a group chat app, not a forum. And being thrown into a group chat with 100 strangers is kind of the worst.

be_excellent_to_each_other,
be_excellent_to_each_other avatar

It’s a group chat app, not a forum. And being thrown into a group chat with 100 strangers is kind of the worst.

I do appreciate that nuance but IRC (as of last I checked - admittedly it's been about a decade since I was habitually connected to IRC) is not really like that despite fitting essentially the same description.

Discord shines when you use it with a tight-knit group. A RL friend group, a gaming clan, etc.

That makes sense, I can see that.

TeaHands,
@TeaHands@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah I expect given how long ago IRC’s heydey was, we’re talking about quite a different demographic. Everyone I know who used it was on the nerdy side (this includes me, it’s not an insult!), whereas things like Discord with their modern interfaces make things easy enough that for example I run a crafting community on there full of old ladies sharing their cross stitch.

Anything that attracts huge numbers of regular folks like that is gonna be a target for trolls and spammers and suchlike, so without good moderation a public server can spiral down quite fast in my experience. Add to all this the ever-increasing hostility and us-vs-them of people on the internet in general, and ugh.

I’m sure there are plenty of lovely spaces out there too ofc, it’s just finding them that’s the trick :)

be_excellent_to_each_other,
be_excellent_to_each_other avatar

I’m sure there are plenty of lovely spaces out there too ofc, it’s just finding them that’s the trick :)

Thanks for the followup - I have to agree and I suppose the takeaway is I (possibly) picked the wrong servers so far.

zzzz,

Discord shines when you use it with a tight-knit group. A RL friend group, a gaming clan, etc.

I have barely ever used Discord. What does it offer that you couldn’t find in, say, a Signal Group?

TeaHands,
@TeaHands@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve never used Signal, so can’t really answer that. But really assuming it’s the same sort of thing, which group messaging app you’re using isn’t as important as the people you’re using it with.

Personally I don’t do group chats on a lot of other apps due to them being quite all-or-nothing in terms of notifications. My favourite thing about Discord (been using it since back when it was in alpha) was the ability to separate out different channels and have actual granular control over what’s worth being notified about.

I don’t use voice / video chat much at all but it’s so handy to, for example, have it for the annual fantasy football draft in my league server even though we literally don’t touch it and just stick to 100% text chat the rest of the year.

If signal does all those things too, then they’re probably pretty similar.

zzzz,

OK, thanks!

amitten,

Discord is built for gaming. Discord allows you to stream a game directly to a channel with one click. Discord allows for fine control over users in the server and what they are allowed to do. Signal doesn’t really have these features, and I’m guessing it’s becsuse the purpose is slightly different.

The closest privacy focused alternative to discord that I know of is Matrix. I’m thinking of moving my discord server where my friends and I play together over to Matrix. We will lose some features but gain some privacy.

I think there are discord clones that work very much like discord, but I’m not aware of their privacy focus. Revolt comes to mind : revolt.chat

zzzz,

Thank you for the detailed answer!

SuiXi3D,
SuiXi3D avatar

Ditto.

Ashtear,

Mostly the same for me. I’ve been poking around Bluesky too but I’m having trouble finding content/follows I like.

be_excellent_to_each_other,
be_excellent_to_each_other avatar

Feeds are the secret at Bluesky. Once you have a few of those you like, look at deck.blue.

amitten,

It’s interesting that you say that because I have trouble finding content that I like on all microblogging platforms : Mastodon, X, threads and all. If you crack the code, let me know.

BolexForSoup,
BolexForSoup avatar

Same!

ggecko,

cohost, tildes, lobste.rs, rss feed reader

amitten,

Just checked out cohost. Looks cool and thanks for the tip.

some_guy,

Lemmy, GitHub, Hacker News, a number of blogs in my RSS reader of choice (Reeder).

h_a_r_u_k_i,
@h_a_r_u_k_i@programming.dev avatar

Mostly 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.

w3dd1e,

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.

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Lemmy, Matrix and Piped.

sloonark,

Since Boost for Reddit still works I’m usually over there.

xGIHOST,

Wait what? How?

TacoNissan,

If you moderate a community you still get access

AceFuzzLord,

Even 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.

Pika,

If 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

kratoz29,

According 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

kaffiene,

Mastodon mostly

Thisfox,

Forums. Those of interests that interest me, specific games forums, OS forums, comic book forums, forums.

Lemmy is just a weird poorly-designed forum I also read.

thequickben,

Which forums do you visit? I’m in need of new forums :)

Thisfox,

Bay12 for Dwarf Fortress ( www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ ), The Nice Forum for Freefall freefall.purrsia.com and Doc Rat www.docrat.com.au , etc. etc. You need to go to your interest first, then join their forum second. I’m sure you have interests different to mine.

fluffery,
@fluffery@lemmy.ml avatar

Matrix, lemmy, mastodon, mumble, im not a fan of irc I have an xmpp, i dont use it often tho I also have signal for irls

fluffery,
@fluffery@lemmy.ml avatar

Ive used discord, trying to run away from it

If anyone wants to chat im down my contact site lol (idk if thats self advertising)

amitten,

Hey I’m here for it. Thanks for the link–I’ll add you to my feed.

amitten,

Why not IRC? I mean, if you want private conversation, then that’s not your place. But for a community? Not sure I see a huge problem with it. I love the idea of XMPP as a better IRC, but I never found a place to hang out there. What do you think?

eezeebee,
@eezeebee@lemmy.ca avatar

Discord

Trollivier,

Yeah I’m on like 6 discord servers.

pazzeda,

6? I’m on… 90? Oh lord.

Trollivier,

Congratulations! I can’t deal with that amount of notifications.

thejodie,

I don’t really get a lot of notifications from discord. Sometimes a “server” will @everyone but that’s rare. I usually just disable that feature when I join new servers anyway.

Trollivier,

I have too many servers that use @everyone. Annoying.

eezeebee,
@eezeebee@lemmy.ca avatar

I’m in dozens, but frequent about 6 as well. I find it’s pretty good for finding communities about niche subjects which helps replace reddit. It also feels less like yelling into the void since there is that “live chat” feeling, and yet I never feel pressured to answer immediately.

OurTragicUniverse,
OurTragicUniverse avatar

Since leaving reddit with the migration, I'm now on Kbin, tumblr, Tildes, and playing somewhat more regularly on Subeta and Dappervolk.

zzzz,

Would you be willing to invite me to Tildes? I’d like to join.

OurTragicUniverse, (edited )
OurTragicUniverse avatar

Do you still need an invite?
(Also is there any way to DM across instances? Not sure how to send you the link ontherwise)

zzzz,

I would love one! I emailed the site admin as instructed in the announcement blog post, but haven’t heard back yet. Let me try to DM you (my app shows me the option, although I’m not sure whether or not it’ll work…). I’m going to send it right away, so if you see this reply but no DM, it’ll mean the DM didn’t work.

OurTragicUniverse,
OurTragicUniverse avatar

https://tildes.net/register?code=6BSGR-R8QLT-QK7M8

Let me know if it works! I'll send you another if someone's used it before you got to it.

zzzz,

Got it! Thanks a lot!

OurTragicUniverse,
OurTragicUniverse avatar

I haven't had any invites to give out, I would otherwise!

From what I've read they're given out randomly to Tildes users but I'm guessing there might be an upvote/comment/post threshold that has to be reached first to be eligible, and it's unlikely I've come close to that yet.

I got invited by someone on Kbin tho, so keep asking in threads like these and hopefully you'll get one soon!

zzzz,

Got it. I’ll keep asking around. Thanks!

ShittyKopper,

Every time a site update/announcement/whatever happens everyone with an account older than like a week (iirc?) gets topped up to 10 invites. You can (could?) also just go to r/tildes or email and ask. They use invites more as a way to slow registrations down than to be an exclusive club so it’s really not that hard to get your hands on one.

zzzz,

OK, thanks for the tip. I’ll try sending an email.

OurTragicUniverse,
OurTragicUniverse avatar

Where are the invites kept for tildes users to give out? Like how do I find them on the site?

ShittyKopper,

tildes.net/invite should let you generate some

OurTragicUniverse,
OurTragicUniverse avatar

Thank you! I had no idea.

beanson,

I’m on Kbin but I’m not really sure what the future of the project holds, and the lack of an app (except as PWA) makes the experience less enjoyable than Lemmy IMO. Also on Discuit which is smaller and feels pretty organic and relaxed; I tend to engage more there.

amitten,

Tildes is a new one to me. It looks quite a bit smaller. How do you like it there?

OurTragicUniverse,
OurTragicUniverse avatar

I read through the top pages every few days and there's some interesting people there.

It's a very small community though and not a place for memes or silliness, so it's kinda intimidating and I don't commemt much.

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