news.ycombinator.com aka Hacker News.
tildes.net and www.scienceforums.net are aight.
Also some subreddits and some more niche forums like blenderartists.org etc…
Perhaps ironically, Reddit. It just has so many people that there’s loads of novelty, serendipity, and people that can relate to what I post…
Stack Exchange. Sometimes it’s wacky, but most of the time it’s super interesting to see how people solve personal and professional problems. Also, I like seeing small slices of specialized fields. Like reading stuff about space or math or chemistry…
Do GitHub discussions for bugs I’m hoping will be fixed count as a forum? 😅
Reddit. It just has so many people that there’s loads of novelty, serendipity, and people that can relate to what I post…
Same here. Looks like the positive side of centralisation
Haha that definitely counts.
Hexbear looks interesting
Reddit I also love to use those discourse forums of various projects. But thats a different type of forum
I like to jump between Lemmy and Reddit, and I think these are the only two I use.
Pale Moon and OpenOffice PHPBB-based forums. However, I don’t participate on them at all, I only read.
Away from that, I visit and participate in BAI which is a spanish-centric text/image-board.
lobste.rs is pretty decent for tech topics I find
Reddit as there are so many people on there. Although I would like to see alternatives like Lemmy take off because its open source and decentralised
Reddit*
*I strictly browse using the privacy friendly front-end https://teddit.net/ and I don’t own an account.
Lemmygrad
No one has mentioned metafilter yet??
Its like a reddit that never acquired enough critical mass to become huge and attract shitty people but at the same time attracted enough people to become its own stable little community.
I particularly enjoy that there is a tradition of making high effort posts where people link together several links on a topic/news story into a paragraph about it. Posts often feel like interesting mini blog posts about a topic rather than just a short description and link and I often find myself learning really interesting things reading metafilter.
It is full of generally left leaning people and the site is maintained by paid moderators so I have never run into toxic bullshit there.
Also I think to make an account to post you have to make a one time payment of $5 or so to discourage people from joining who don’t actually want to be there (and discourage trolls).
I am truly addicted to Slashdot.org besides Lemmy.
Btw, fuck Reddit in every possible way.
A group of Telegram channels, I would say. Telegram is a vast network and is beautiful and obscene, because of the wide variety of channels it has, from pirates to anarchists to porno distributers to criminals to neo nazis. Some may disagree with such obscenity being beautiful, but I like the freedom as I am able to sift through it without being sucked in.
NoGoolag is an incredible one and also a starting point, though be warned, it has some anarchist minded and a tiny bit of conspiratorial news articles shared, but overall it is a goldmine. One can easily dive deep into resources from there, whoever is capable of not being sucked into the black hole.
One could get into establishing trust with the old ones and internet veterans (like myself) deep into Discord, IRC, Matrix, XMPP and darker corners. But I doubt most people, even here, can dive there and come out unaffected.
I am not sure of an answer here, really, that adds to the general answers already mentioned here, that might be safer to consume. But then I am the kind of person that loves to read, dig deep and investigate a lot, so that is just me.
Edit: if I may come off across as attacking anarchism, I do not mean that here. Some people really are just anti government absolutist nutjobs who preach anarchy to the next level. I am sure even actual anarchists do not like them.
Telegram is no more secure than any other for-profit platform it claims to be an alternative to.
You are honking the wrong horn here. Telegram is a type of public forum in the form of messaging app, and it does not need to be E2EE for purpose of reading and viewing resources on topics.
Telegram or Discord are not supposed to be a WhatsApp or Signal. Different tools.
I agree. If they’re used solely as any other public forum. The problem is it supports the ecosystem of these platforms’ faux private chats. Also if you have to create an account to view a public chat why not make it encrypted all the way? Matrix.org supports encrypted rooms.
It’s also ridiculous that you have to give a phone number to use any “type of public forum”, telegram.
It is just what has become the easiest way to keep alt accounts away, I guess. Also makes for a dystopian future, however you want to see it.
If those platforms had some “benevolent” AI that could track data points and clusters without the need for a phone number, to track sockpuppets, platforms might not use phone number. Or if they had experienced people like me, like I am here at Lemmy, that regularly help shut down alts, trolls and harassers, that would be another option. Both of these are harder than just using phone number identifier, it seems, as R&D for that kind of benevolent AI tracker would cost colossal amounts of money.
NeoGAF, Muusikoiden.net forum and TechBBS
Briar
