I second this question! I'd like to know some good servers with healthy communities.

I don't get the whole twitter-like microblogging thing. Mastodon feels kind of strange to me because it's similar to that. I try to find a cool place to hang out there, but it always feels like a waste. But YouTube... the amount of time I give YouTube.. lol

Go chiefs! I’m from KC so it’s cool to see a community on lemmy—and I had no idea it existed until right now.

I feel the exact same way my friend. Even when lemmy was on the rise (when I joined), I knew that it wasn’t going to receive wide adoption. And unfortunately wide adoption is exactly what is needed to solve the problems you have mentioned.

As much as I love the idea of lemmy, I like the idea of community and connection more. I say go to the places where you find those things because that will be the most meaningful to you. You may find that for a more privacy and free thinking community on lemmy, but for other topics you probably have to go elsewhere. For now.

So go and connect with people over things that you love!

I find the Mastodon/Threads/Twitter medium to be kind of hard to love sometimes. You must have found a great community! Where/who do you interact with on Mastodon?

An RSS reader is the ideal tool for that. No need to remember to go to every site when all of them are in one place. And most blogs have an RSS feed as well.

No Mastodon? I always assume all of us lemmy people use Mastodon (if they are into the twitter kind of thing).

I'm in support of this. I was explaining to my wife just a bit ago that most of the "content" on lemmy and kbin is all about lemmy and kbin, and very little about anything else. For those of us coming from reddit, most of the content on reddit isn't about reddit. I'd like it if lemmy and kbin was mostly original content.

This is my take as well.

Which IRC servers are worth some time?

This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

My question was not to ask for you to find something that's interesting to me. My question was to ask how do you personally go about finding interesting (to you) RSS feeds. Tools or methods was what I was looking for. For example, see @redshift@lemmy.ml and their reply to this post.

I’ve found that small blogs are excellent for this. I started my own and reached out to a few smaller blogs from some really interesting people. I instantly felt at home in the community.

One more vote for ChatGPT. I use it all the time to get me pointed in the right direction, or to start fleshing out an algorithm. It’s a great starting place.

Yep. It’s a cycle that I continually get better at working with instead of against.

I used to get on 4chan about 13 years ago. From my experience, it was a cesspool even way back then—but mostly on random. There were some other communities that were really cool. I kind of wish that was still a thing

Inoreader has been great. There is a premium tier but I've never actually needed it. Nice, polished, professional, and perfect transition between iOS and the web interface.

The idea of my question is to ask how one goes about this discovery of finding these interesting blogs.

The problem with YouTube is that is so easy to just default to letting it feed your brain. Frequently it's not even enjoyable, it's just straight distraction from anything meaningful. On the flip side, YouTube can be the absolute best place to learn anything.

Wow it’s been so long since I’ve thought about IRC. Does anyone you know still use it regularly?

Why not IRC? I mean, if you want private conversation, then that's not your place. But for a community? Not sure I see a huge problem with it. I love the idea of XMPP as a better IRC, but I never found a place to hang out there. What do you think?

I literally had to disable YouTube shorts. My life improved significantly when I just didn't have shorts thrown in my face constantly.

I've been toying with the idea of starting a physics (astrophysics welcome) community over at https://normalcity.life/(my home lemmy instance) for physics academics. I'd love a community like that because it's my everyday life. Does that sound interesting? Not sure if others would be interested.

Edit: home instance clarification

It does feel a bit better, but I still struggle to contribute. It feels like it's a bit noisy still - maybe I just need to reduce how much content I'm subscribed to.

On the big instances or some niche ones?

Not blasphemy at all. If you enjoy it, then it's a great place for you. What good communities do you know of on IRC?

Edit: and matrix? Edit: and Mastodon too? lol

Sad. Guess we just have to go through them

Tildes is a new one to me. It looks quite a bit smaller. How do you like it there?

Hey I'm here for it. Thanks for the link--I'll add you to my feed.

My wife and I run a very active discord server. I created it for the friends that we have made playing video games, and so we just all play games together and chat on there. It wasn't a server that I've really advertised to random people; it's just for people that we end up playing with.

Hehe… magic dick.

Just checked out cohost. Looks cool and thanks for the tip.

I've never seen misskey. I'll have to check it out

What servers and channels do you use, and why? Super curious.

I use a service called Inoreader. It's an RSS reader that can be used on the browser, iOS and android. The free version allows you like 150 feeds or something like that with a lot of functionality. There's really no reason to buy the service.

You just either search the blog in the inoreader search bar. Or, in the case of smaller blogs (which is where I like to spend most of my time), you just look for a link to their RSS feed somewhere on the website. Below is a screenshot of what an example RSS feed link looks like.

I used this video as a guide and it worked: https://youtu.be/WtFBrB4XqBc?si=635fN0fa7jN77evj

This disables the YouTube shorts suggestions, which is how I would get sucked into watching shorts all the time. You can still go to shorts if you want, but I guarantee you will mostly forget about them with the suggestions disabled. Shows how little value they really give.

It’s interesting that you say that because I have trouble finding content that I like on all microblogging platforms : Mastodon, X, threads and all. If you crack the code, let me know.

So, don’t use lemmy as a software because there are some disagreeable things on one of the instances? Who gives a shit? This is the whole point of the fediverse. Defederate. Go to another instance. Mod. Block. Do whatever because that’s what the fediverse alows.

The logical inconsistency of supporting the fediverse but not supporting a method of accessing the fediverse because of content on the fediverse is very severe.

Sorry--it was sarcasm.

I personally think the best way to use discord is to create a server and invite people to it as you meet them online. For me, it’s gaming that connects me with people. My wife and I meet people that we like and want to play with more, and so we invite them. This usually results in getting invited to other small community servers.

I had no idea! I'm not sure how if I want RSS with lemmy/kbin. I might not want the noise in the RSS feed, you know? Just highly curated interesting stuff.