Damn, I can't stand open-source projects that host their "forums" on Discord. It's a nigthmare to use, it's heavy, slow, and it's completely unsearchable from the web.
First of all not everyone wants spectators and gawkers on all of their conversations. As for open solutions, IRC didn't provide chat history for the common folk (no, most users are not able to host their own Pi Zero bouncer, especially back in 2017), and Matrix development was too slow (Elements implemented message pinning in 2022), so the rest was history. There was just no alternative to Slack or Discord.
Luckily, we have alternatives: Bluesky, Mastodon. Even Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit nowadays (I'd say, even better than Reddit). It has a bit of a Hacker News vibe, but on different subjects.
I view my presence as mostly transactional here. I read posted content, I read comments, I sometimes comment and have exchanges like this. But aside from a little dopamine hit from getting a few upvotes, my emotional investment here is limited.
I don’t have professional or personal connections here (though I know a few members irl) and this is not part of my permanent digital identity— I don’t have one of those, for a few reasons. Others do it differently, and I think the risk of HN going bad is low, so I understand the risk they are taking.
This is a mall - a publically open space privately owned by others - not a true public square. It’s better than x, fb, etc. in part because the private ownership is mostly used for good (strong moderation) rather than for obvious bad.
I've weaned off Meta and X entirely, but not a single person I know IRL, including family, has. Standing on principle shows you how many people you know wouldn't even consider it.
You shouldn't look for interesting Lemmy instances; you can pretty much use any instance and subscribe to interesting _communities_ from there.
If English is not your native tongue, I'd suggest you to find an instance in your language, so you can easily see all kinds of content if you filter by "Local".
Depends how you define "strong activity". Its only 50k MAU so i'd say its punching far above its weight in terms on good content/users. The tech(selfhosting, linux, privacy) communities are pretty good, you make a post you will get answers and discussion.
The difference is not the company so much as the conviction of the person I am responding to. Although X has snagged names they want for their own use away from users
I also feel like nobody uses Twitter anymore, after Musk bought it. Now it's just random scammers and "tech bros".
It doesn't surprise me at all, after reading "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Interesting behind the scenes of what happened to Twitter.
It's a “community” thing. Some communities have vanished from Twitter almost entirely (like historians), some have massively increased their presence on bluesky but kept their Twitter presence (ex: the military OSINT crowd) and others didn't move at all (Machine learning people are all on Twitter and nowhere else).
Where? I have tried Bluesky a couple of times last year and it's minuscule compared to X. I just need to create a new account on X, then follow some popular account like ICML, ICLR, arXiv.stats, arXiv.ML and I'll get more research news than I could ever consume from the feed, the recommendation from related accounts often provide all the big releases from big labs, no following needed.
But I definitely notice a pretty significant portion of the academic CS community are beginning to materialize on bluesky. You can probably start with Nathan Lambert (natolambert) or Jeremy Howard's bsky and branch out from there. (They tend to be schelling points for open AI networks, simonw also, swyx would be if he started using bsky also.)
You can browse starter packs (https://github.com/stevendborrelli/bluesky-tech-starter-pack...) to get an idea of where the communities are forming. For instance, the macOS/iOS people I used to follow on twitter are posting more on bluesky. If steipete started posting there, that would be half my twitter/x feed anyway..
On bsky, like a few AI/tech things (simonw, dan abramov, jeff dean, ethan mollick etc, and the people in their replies). Then use discover and this 'for you' feed - https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social to find additional things to like. Then follow the people who post what you're liking. (spacecowboy17 is running a feed that looks at your likes and then populates the feed with people who have a similar like cluster to you). Consider adding this anti-ai-ai labeler if you're put off by some people - https://bsky.app/profile/antiantiai.bsky.social
I think the bsky ML/tech content is relatively thin and people are overstating its volume. But it does exist, and some of it is not posted elsewhere. (Or the posters aren't at least.)
I don't know how your twitter is tuned, but I'm overwhelmed by the volume of meaningful twitter ML info. If you turn on swipe to 'not interested in this post' and bookmark/like/click even a few posts (and maybe follow a few AI people), it really becomes a feed of just ML info very quickly. And it's pretty easy to get the engagement bait filtered out this way too.
There is still a lot of ML in my Twitter feed, it's just over the years it morphed to the fad of the month (currently Claude Code mostly). And I try to follow new interesting accounts all the time but still the quality seems to be going down.
I don't know if my language grammar rules (Italian) are different than English, but I've always seen spaces before and after em-dashes. I don't like the em-dash being stuck to two unrelated words.
That's because in Italian, like in many other European languages, you use en-dashes to separate parenthetical clauses. The en-dash is used with space, the em-dash (mostly) without space and that's why it's longer. On old typewriters they were frequently written as "--" and "---" respectively. So yes, it's mostly an English thing. Stick to your trattinos, they're nice!
>a channel that let you control your TV with the Wii sensor bar
Are you sure about that? The Wii sensor bar is not a sensor at all; it's just a pair of small lights that the camera on top of the Wii Remote monitors in order to determine movement.
The Wii was still in the SD era and only had analog outputs, it never got HDMI. (I guess it could have done CEC over SCART in the EU, but this channel was in JP where they used D-tanshi)
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