Ask HN: What other forums or social networks do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What other forums or social networks do you use?

A lot of people are leaving major social networks like Reddit and Facebook - especially hackers - so I'm curious where they're settling in instead. I hear about Lobsters, Notabug, Ruqqus, Mastodon, etc., and there's probably dozens more, so I'd like to hear about what you use and how it suits you.

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Nobody's leaving Reddit lol, Facebook for sure after marking birthdays/events on another calendar there's like zero value to Facebook for me & bulk of my friends.

Twitter, HN, Reddit, occasional IG for art/inspiration/friends updates

The way I use reddit and HN is more like a forum than what consider true social media, like Facebook and Twitter.

Strava - I'm not interested in Kom but like to see who's out

I gave Reddit a try recently and just couldn't get into it. Low karma really limited my ability to get involved.

I've been enjoying getting involved on Indie Hackers, I've been writing lots of posts and engaging with people there the past few weeks, like this one about the impact of Product-Led Growth on user researchers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-interviewed-100-people-h...

Keep coming back to Indie Hackers because people are engaging positively and I'm finding little communities to follow. Never found that with Reddit.

This is the second recommendation for indiehackers, so I'm gonna give it a try.

> Keep coming back to Indie Hackers because people are engaging positively and I'm finding little communities to follow. Never found that with Reddit.

This was exactly what reddit was like, 10 years ago. Great little communities of passionate people (passionate about seeing faces in teacups or dragons fucking cars, but passionate all the same), a feeling of a community with a common culture. Nowadays even cutting out larger subreddits and following only smaller ones doesn't help, the energy and creativity has largely gone missing (IMO, YMMV, etc).

I’m currently evaluating indie hackers and product hunt to see if it is a fit.

1 - https://indiehackers.com

2- https://producthunt.com

Product hunt died off a few years ago.

At first, it was great with a diverse community of early adopters, entrepreneurs, designers, developers and others.

Noticing that stuff gets a lot of views if posted there, it became popular among growth hackers - which turned into spam and timing/review strategies. They post a product and get employees and friends to vote and comment on how great it is and how their "list of best kale recipes for makers" is such a great product ahead of its time.

Then it became overly positive, to the point where you could barely find a critique on any post - people would follow and upvote and require you to do the same.

Also a lot of coming soon products got posted, and a lot of "list of X, list of Y" products started to surface which became boring to follow after a while. It stopped being a thing for early adopters and just became another media outlet where people post their sideprojects or new updates/launches of their products.

I like Mastodon but haven't stuck with it reliably yet -- I think the instances are key, and it could have a lot of value for instances focused on certain communities (e.g. certain geographic regions, or academics, or whatever). Sort of like federated forums. My gut tells me it won't reach critical mass though and I have mixed feelings about it (e.g., maybe that's fine, maybe it has a circular uptake problem).

I've liked Gurlic too a lot, but I'm not sure how well it will scale to a more heterogeneous community. It reminds me a lot of HN but broader in its focus and smaller.

> I think the instances are key, and it could have a lot of value for instances focused on certain communities (e.g. certain geographic regions, or academics, or whatever).

These exist - Japanese instances, German instances, an instance for academia, etc. - but instance discovery and search in general is pretty bad on Mastodon. I think that's a key problem that'd holding a lot of the potential of federation back.

Reddit. Also recently discovered Telegram. It's quite fun, UI is better than WhatsApp's

Usenet and IRC. There are also a few other web forums I sometimes use, such as NESdev.

I'm trying to start my own forum for my friends and I to use. I'm having trouble getting that initial momentum though... it's hard to beat plain sms texting.

Sounds like a cool idea. I encourage you to try. It would be cool in the future to have some easy tool to start a personal Internet Space built on top of some open protocols to easily communicate and share data but still own the thing.

I'm in the process of gathering some friends and we plan to start a blog/newsletter, just for us. We're going to share our projects, achievements and cool stuff we enjoy. We've already had a small success - I connected two of my friends who study Psychology and Biomedical Engineering at different universities and together we're going to write an article about differences in brain structure and behavior.

Mainly HN, also I have a pretty curated Twitter following (tech and startups) so Twitter is second in line, then Indie Hackers, and lastly Tildes at https://tildes.net.

Tildes is a new one for me, but I am enjoying its simple UI and smaller community.

i really like to be inspired by product hunt, some people are extremely creative.

my own sHiTMyseLf.com

see profile for entry creds

Slack

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