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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
amitten @normalcity.life

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?

175 comments

  • 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.

  • 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’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.

      • How do u setup RSS?

    • I know some websites with single moms looking for connections...

  • 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?

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Discord and the osrs grand exchange w390 or dustbowl tf2

  • 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.

  • 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

    • 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?

    • 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)

  • 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

175 comments