It's hard to find niche forums where you have small communities these days. Or maybe I lost touch with what the young crowd is doing. From my school times, I remember hanging out on forums where we worked on things like reverse engineering Siemens feature phones. Or my town's IRC channel. Or weird international places like cdc discussions (or was it nsf?).

I don't even know we're I could find people with commitment to such ideas anymore. Maybe some private slack instances, or diving into one of the distributed Twitter replacements?

I'm not saying these were placed where invocation actually happened, but I know they were a jump start place for many people. It's hard to have meaningful, small, dedicated communities online these days. Anything good gets popular and anything too popular gets bad in the end.