I haven't. Internet is nothing more than an addiction for me. Internet is dead and misanthropic nowadays. It's soulless and corporate. It used to be fun, artistic, creative, and educational. Now it's neither of those, with extremely few exceptions like Wikipedia.
> This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.
I read reddit and HN constantly because I seem to have an unhealthy compulsion to keep up with the news, politics, tech, and the world, but other than that I wouldn't say I like either site, or that they're fun.
I feel like the reality is that every recommendation algorithm have been cranked up to 11 to throw garbage at you. The "good old internet" is not completely gone, all the thing you mentioned, fun, artistic, creative & educational are still there.
I'd even say that when it come to educational it have actually massively gotten better, and still is, *but it is getting harder and harder to find it*.
Google search is garbage, Youtube throw you shorts clickbaity shit, so does twitter, and Facebook is a wasteland. Yet the interesting blogs are still there, the youtube content creators are still producing educational content, artists are still producing stuff.
*Search* has gotten worse. So you simply won't find as much as you used to, and your old channel is getting filled with SEO garbage and clickbait recommendation system preferences.
Part of it, for me, is age and locale. If I was in LA or a large city I might feel like there's worthwhile things to do offline -but I'm not, and largely there isn't; not if you're single and older, at least.
So I hover around reddit, hn and various discords because what else am I going to do? Go clubbing? There's no clubs, and I'm too old beside.
Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficially so. Once you start trying to get into these communities a bit more seriously, you realize is just a big pile of old drama, discursive substance has long left, and it's just a bunch of weird old friends you don't know hanging out.
The most extreme instance of this are old MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Oh man, I really want them to be big thing again, they are so deep and interesting. Like old bulletin-boards, IRC and forums, but embedded in a living world. The closest we've gotten to an actual social metaverse world simulation is in text-form. Some are still relatively active, but most users are not engaged with the world anymore, it's mostly just a small chatroom with a musky odor.
I do agree that HN is a big exception to this, and there are indeed fresh federated platforms that are thriving. Mastodon is the main one, although I was never a big fan of the Twitter formula. And I couldn't get into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, it's still too sparse and wild, the focus on semi-isolated server communities is both a strength and a significant source of disorientation.
All the content comes from basically an m3u8 playlist, so you can scrape it if you like (which I do), but it's mostly older folks who just hang out and chat all day about old sci-fi/horror movies. Occasionally, someone I know from IRL way back shows up.
Then, of course, you have Medium (rather enshitified now, but still big), and it's heir Substack (starting to get enshitified, but thriving) and newsletters in general. They are both huge and growing, long-form content is having a resurgence. Not to mention the phenomenon of podcasts, and let's not underestimate how much high-quality earnest content is on YouTube.
These are all modernized versions of old web patterns, first plain-old HTML content sites, and then blogs. And, well, ol' grandfather Radio, now greatly democratized.