Somewhere where I can read what “amateurs” are researching in their free time?
There’s a few channels I follow on YouTube, but they all seem to be living off of the content they produce
I’m curious about communities of people with scientific inclinations, doing experiments of interesting things “at home”
Be prepared to be underwhelmed if you are doing it for the publication, though. Most published papers don't lead to anything. Do the research for fun, and publish to share your results. Actually, if you are a small "research for fun" shop, you can target tier 2 journals and conferences, and you will run into an enthusiastic community of people in your subfield.
Of course, this depends on knowing how to do new research, write research papers, and talk to peer reviewers. That is the bigger barrier to entry.
In a totally different vein, there are alternative & traditional sailboat riggings that have no value to race sailors for tightly constrained performance reasons, and have been completely abandoned by production boat builders. The optimal configuration of sail surface and control lines for these rigs on modern hulls is actively researched by amateurs, sometimes with quite a lot of rigor.
Someone I know is an orchardist with an interest in historical/regional pear varietals. Most of them don't stand up well to shipping and so are commercially unviable, but he communicates with a loose network of other similarly interested growers, exchanging information about growing conditions, pests, and results specific to these fruits.
I'm sure there are many many other examples, these are just some that I'm aware of. I don't think there's a single place where this sort of thing happens, I doubt most practitioners even think of themselves as participating in research per se separate from their specific interest.
If it's something you're interested in, my suggestion would be to decide on a rough area and then seek out experts to brainstorm ideas for a suitable problem for you to work on, maybe one that leverages your existing skills in a creative way (like the engineer in the above example).
Can you expand on this? Like people who have full time jobs in perhaps a different field but do research on the side using the facilities/resources of a university? If so how does one slide into a gig like that?
Without a plan, per se, I nurtured a burgeoning personal research interest that was well outside my field. The initial hobby was very rudimentary but it gave me enough feedback and fuel that over a number of years I built more advanced software and hardware to investigate it more scientifically. Eventually, having reached the limits of the data I had access to, I reached out to a local university to start a collaboration.
If you already have an idea, I think, as long as you're sufficiently interested in actually doing research, you'll be able to find some professor that is as well. On the flip side, I know for a fact that most professors have more research ideas than students, so they can certainly provide you with things to investigate.
As a bonus, for the professor, since this is a side gig for you, there isn't an cost for them (or much less of one). Access to facilities and resources depend on the university. But I was certainly surprised by what I was given access to in the service of doing the research.
Let's put it this way. If you can write a (1) good grant proposal with a good chance of getting funded you are required these days to (2) get a professor to be the principal investigator if you want to spend it and I'd say (1) is much harder than (2). Not like it is easy, but it is possible.
“Einstein expressed over and over again the thought that one should not couple the quest for knowledge with a bread-and-butter profession, but that research should be done as a private spare-time occupation. He himself wrote the first of his great treatises while earning his living as an employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He believed that only in this way could one preserve one's independence. What he did not consider, however, was the organizational rigidity of almost all professions, and the importance which individual members of a profession attach to their work. No professional pride could develop without it. To be able successfully to practice science as a hobby, one has to be an Einstein.”
And, I just keep doing the research because I love the research part of it. I find it relaxing and it allows me to stretch my tech skills at the same time.
I want to be able to see what “normal” people are doing. Would love something like a GitHub/stack exchange of people just openly and curiously sharing their research with other “normal” people
“Serious” research is just too serious and exclusive for people who are not doing it to become researchers nor care about scientific prestige
ArXiv is close to what you suggest and helps with the last two, but there's no real reason for anyone to read your paper on ArXiv without any authority signal that it's worth reading.
This naturally creates two problems. The first is discovery amidst the noise of non-serious research activity. To find it you have to be aware the research is happening and you literally have to talk to the people doing it. One thing NSA used to (maybe still does) do very well was finding non-academic researchers doing interesting theoretical computer science work that was never going to end up in a journal. The second is that there are a couple domains where there are decades of accumulated research where almost none of it was published, so it is difficult to bootstrap yourself into the state-of-the-art because so little of it was written down. There is also the reality that some traditional sponsors of non-academic computer science research have asymmetric advantage as an explicit objective, which benefits from non-publication.
Now I wonder if there are other communities like that one, but around other topics