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139 pointspmoriarty36 comments

I know a lot of people like to dunk on Reddit, but the Emacs subreddit is pretty good: https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/new/?limit=100

I have gotten a few good answers out of that one.

Smaller, niche subreddits are almost always good as I find. Then there are some banter oriented small ones which are also to the point for what they were stood up so they too are good in my book. Problems start when there are too many tangents and toxic behaviors.

I’ve found traditional web forums less helpful in recent times. One that comes to mind is the virtual box forums where moderators seem to act like total unfriendly asshats, doing things like complaining if you redact data (great way to cause data leaks / breaches for their users).

Reddit, while there are arguments, seems to have some reasonably well behaved users, at least in the subreddits I occasionally ghost, all who haven’t reached any kind of critical mass.

Smaller, niche subreddits are the "uncontroversial Wikipedia articles" of the platform.

I do not know of a better source for RISC-V news than r/RISCV

The advantage of Reddit could also be seen as a disadvantage:

There are SO MANY subreddits. It's bad in that you don't always know which one to go to. Good in that if you don't like one, there's another one that's very similar.

Is there a friendly and active chat community for Emacs? There are so many topics where asking for tips and opinions is valuable and doesn't fit well wikis or Q&A formats.

#emacs on irc.libera.chat.

fsbot knows too many things.

#emacs is one of the sweetest place on the electronic universe. It can go weird, or bland, or smart.. but it's always cool. a lot of platforms and chans are filled with protocol heavy users and mods, and angry conversations on rails .. #emacs bubbles aside on its own, untainted by the storms.

I'd also like to say its a great place. I hung out there for awhile when I was giving Emacs another 6 months of my life (as a lifelong vimmer), great community.

Doom Emacs’ Discord chat is great, even if you’re not using Doom. Very friendly and helpful. Emacs subreddit is also good, helpful, and active

There's also a Vi and Vim StackExchange: https://vi.stackexchange.com/

Mastodon Emacs discussion is flourishing nicely. Lots going on at https://emacs.ch instance. I sometimes post Emacs things at https://indieweb.social/@xenodium

Mastodon and/or emacs.ch is the way to go. I posted something over there recently and got a lot more traction than I ever did by posting on my blog and on Reddit.

I'm on the generic mastodon.social but I don't understand how these topic-specific instances are supposed to work, unless emacs is literally your highest priority in life. Is the idea that you'd have a separate mastodon account for every topic you're interested in?

The idea (AFAICT) is that you follow/subscribe people on any instance from your account on your primary instance. This works, but the UX is terrible right now, you have to copy the users full handle (name@instance) and paste it into the follow dialogue on your primary instance.

That all works perfectly fine IMHO, what I don't understand is why I'd make my account on an Emacs-focused instance unless literally all I ever wanted to talk about in life was Emacs!

I could have five different accounts on five different instances on topics I'm interested in, but then which one do I log into if I just want to read my overall feed? I guess I'd have one primary account, and then I'd log into my secondary account on the paperclips instance when I wanted to toot about paperclips, but this is the point where the UX seems awfully complicated.

> what I don't understand is why I'd make my account on an Emacs-focused instance unless literally all I ever wanted to talk about in life was Emacs!

Talking on a social network on the Internet is not the same as talking in real life. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon recognizes this.

Maybe all you want to talk about on the Internet is Emacs. Maybe you want to keep your "Emacs nerd" persona totally separate from your "classical music afficionado" persona. Maybe you are part of a group of Emacs committers who want a casual place to hang out.

There are no restrictions on what you talk about [1] on any instance, either technically or socially. Plenty of people just join a random instance associated with some topic, and then are friends with people on other instances. They never look at the instance feed, only at their timeline.

Outside of the small hassle of adding people, there are no real downsides to joining a random instance.

[1] Outside of super controversial or illegal topics.

I imagine you are overthinking the problem here.

It's all about choice.

Small topics instances (like emacs.ch) are cozy to join. They are a collaborative filter to focus exploration on a part of the fediverse. The local timeline will be not just about emacs, but has more likely programming posts than, say, clam biology (hashtag clamfacts, if you're interested).

So your post about keyboard layouts or databases will more likely be discovered/boosted (even if you have no followers on other instances), because the local timeline and hashtags are more quiet than when you're on a general instance (where your posts drown in the noise). Or compared to, say, sauropods.win, were you more likely reach a geologist than a database admin.

Generally I like to be on two or three instances, so my art doodles go to mastodon.art rather than a tech instance (flooded with AI art). I like to check the local timeline or discovery page of other topic-instances via web occasionally, maybe follow someone there to peek into another bubble. The big instances like mastodon.social are just too much, flooded with random stuff I don't care about.

#emacs on Clojurians Slack is active and friendly. I’ve had luck there getting answers on questions I just couldn’t figure out how to Google.

ChatGPT maybe

Emacs as a religion

lots of people hate on Stack Exchange but I honestly think it’s a great service.

StackOverflow is surprisingly bad and doesn’t really have good new questions, that is true. But the other sites are much more helpful. You just have to understand that it’s a QA site for nontrivial questions (i.e you cannot solve by just googling or reading the docs), not a forum for discussion

Second this. Specialized Stack Exchange sites are pretty helpful. The Emacs one specifically helped me many times, and people there seem to be quite knowledgeable.

Yeah, I generally agree with this. After accumulating about 15k points over there across 2-4 sites about 10 years ago, I now treat StackExchange's network as read-only. I never comment or contribute anymore because of the moderators and users. It's now just a repository of stuff that I click on when I Google for results, and I know what kind of site I'm getting. There's value there.

I actually almost posted something this week due to some weird segfaults I was having with a third-party library, but the github maintainer was active and responded in his issues list. So, crisis averted.

Same, I moderated https://blender.stackexchange.com for seven years from pre-inception [0] sinking many many hours into flushing out the community and amassing a proper resource for users. The closest thing to a community back then ~2013 was IRC and blenderartists which was really for showcase but in the later years kept getting distracted with people being offended, tiptoeing on eggshells around certain members of the community/mod team and just random crap all around not related to QA or improving the community. Got exhausted, left and haven't looked back. Despite staying in my small community the issues eventually seeped to other popular ones. It was around this time that several employees left and or were fired as well due to similar reasons, I don't remember all the details.

One of my funniest stories from my time there is how I once closed a question as off-topic (it was) and several years later googled to find one result which was the same question flagged by yours truly (it was still off-topic but the irony wasn't lost).

SE is really a great service especially the smaller niche sites, it just gets a bad rep by the small "elite" few.

[0] - https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40377/blender

A lot of it has to do with scale. Stack Overflow currently gets ~7k questions every day. This is actually lower than it was a few years ago when it was more like ~9-11k every day.

The Blender site gets ~50 questions a day. The Emacs site gets ~6 questions a day (with a total of 25k questions in eight and a half years, only about a fortnight of Stack Overflow).

It's just a completely different thing at those scales. It's the difference between a forum with maybe a few hundred people and Twitter.

Looking at "new" in Python isn't particularly interesting, but I almost always end up on SO when googling an answer.

So calling it "surprisingly bad" isn't fair. I still think it is surprisingly good.

> StackOverflow [...] doesn’t really have good new questions

What does that mean? Do you browse new questions for entertainment?

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