[bonoboTP]

You can also just kind of hop from blog to forum to subreddit to discord to social media account etc. passively over time based on what interesting people are talking about or mentioning. My main point is that you can't expect to find a list of good pockets of the internet with low effort, because if they are low effort to find, they will be flooded and made not good.

[johnnyanmac]

I spent days worth of reseach some years ago trying to find a reddit alternative (think pre-pandemic, well before consensus started to turn). I more or less found a few substitutes (which includes HN), but nothing that ever truly felt like "community".

As you implied here, the sad fact is that a lot of the niche groups live within the mainstream. on a Discord server, or a subreddit, or Facebook group. And I've moved away from most of those. Probably need to move away from Discord in time too.

Either way, still never made a friend that way.