What internet discussion sites remain?
I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.
I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:
- tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
- lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
- Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
- Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
- Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
- Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".
Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.
Sounds about right, minus a lot of the tiny Reddit-alternatives and remaining forums. A lot of topic/issue-specific forums migrated to Reddit/Facebook/Discord in the 2010s.
Yeah, like you say, the only additions I can really think of are those very topic specific communities that manage to keep their own forums (e.g. level1techs), but those only really fit the bill if one exists for your special interest of choice and you’re so into it that you’ll enjoy actually hanging out there rather than just dropping in once every six months to ask a question.
Although I do still love the feeling of running across an ancient but still active phpBB forum for something arcane I’m trying to learn from scratch, because that’s when you know you’re about to get an answer from the literal world expert in whatever topic…
Your example is anchored by a larger platform with their YouTube audience.
I sorely miss the peak of PHP forums and the absolute wealth of communities built around them before social media has consolidated and went mobile-first. Whoever posted those car and appliance repair manuals on these forums are absolute saints.
I've noticed this as well with some YouTube videos/channels, there's some nuggets of good discussion buried beneath the flood. Basically the delivery is strictly educational/informational in nature (not pop-sci type delivery), is somewhat niche to the viewing public and geared for an older audience.
So this could be from car/appliance repair, credit card churning into frequent flyer points, aviation, Battletech, maybe the less mainstream parts of fitness and outdoor hobbies (think ultramarathons and thru-hiking).
Deviate from that and into more mainstream topics, say tech/gadget reviews, big budget gaming, or anyone who puts an exaggerated facial expression on the thumbnail and you'll get the typical mainstream internet discussion experience.
One place I've consistently found low-noise, text-focused chatting is in piracy communities.
It's not ethical to recommend joining but given the anti-capitalist stance of sharing media and it's legality, there's no marketing or influence-botting to be had and the users willing to jump through all the hoops for entry end up being pretty active and invested.
That's actually how I found out and got onto here, lol.
It's pretty rare to find outspoken religious conservatives but you will stumble across a number of tankie-leaning folk or kids trying to be annoying. For the most part the internal forums and IRC networks are well moderated.
I couldn't disagree more, but I guess we just have different ethical systems for ourselves :)
In my world it is very ethical to recommend "piracy", keeping media on local hardware and everything else that entails.
It might be against the rules of tildes to link to specific sites openly, but that is another matter.
You've got some hints how to join ?
The main entry point is a music-focused community that provides interviews on IRC.
They even have a very handy study prep site https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
It's not easy stuff and just the tech issues of waiting for 10+ hours in an IRC server (disconnects toss you out of the line) can be too much for most to handle so I'd recommend to only attempt this if you're a serious collector of tunes that you want to have on your own machines.
Funnily that's probably a pretty great recommendation after all. I recall finding my way onto the homepage of a private tracker a few years ago, and being intimidated and vaguely impressed by the fact that to gain membership, you apparently needed to pass some kind of quiz on topics like encoding standards administered over IRC.
I didn't end up going through the trouble at the time, but in the context of this thread that seems like a reliable way to select for genuinely interested people.
Metafilter still exists. It's a shadow of its former self for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons are to do with the broader ecosystem it operates in but many are related to community self sabotage, which is frustrating to watch. The outcome is, to put it politely, that the quality of discussion has gone down enormously, particularly on ask.metafilter. That's part of the reason I'm here and not there.
I'm also curious about this question. I like it here but tildes and other similar places are very tech heavy, both in content and member makeup, and greater diversity would be more where I'm at. Non tech people seem to mostly be happy with Facebook groups though, which, yeah...
I think it's a bit of correlation though. Folks who are interested in tech things find new and niche tech things to engage with... Which tildes kind of is.
I don't disagree, because, well, here we are, but I'm always surprised by this outcome. We don't have to jump through any technical hoops beyond anything you have to do to use tech things like Instagram to use tildes and unlike examples like the fediverse it Just Works. Why this environment seems to self select tech people I actually have little idea.
Could you summarize the reasons for Metafilter’s decline, or point me to an article? I’ve been aware of it for probably 20 years or more, but rarely visited, so I don’t really know much about what it was like in the past or how it might have changed.
Probably not without having other people familiar with the site vehemently disagree with me (which is part of the problem).
Trying to distill my thoughts on this into something coherent is difficult but factors include cack handed moderation and management, a culture that has grown among some users with policing language rather than intent - including assuming others are operating in bad faith if at all possible, the US centric nature of discussion (that's the English language internet, but mefi could be particularly bad at times) and constant appeals for money coupled with no transparency around where it was going. There's also a real concern from a significant cohort regarding Metafilter's standing that leads to an out of proportion amount of energy being spent on discussing Metafilter, defining Metafilter and codifying Metafilter. It's a degree of self obsession and sturm und drang I've never seen from any other site.
To me, the factors above are the ones that won out - 15 years ago some of those voices were there, but so were many others and, for me, it was a more pleasant place to be.
Stats for the site seem to be at https://mefist.at/
Many such cases. Man the Internet post-Gamergate really does feel like it’s in some kind of intellectual post-apocalypse. Some kind of memetic transition happened, certain rhetorical tricks and cognitive traps just got too effective and too addictive to use and the whole ecosystem seems to have collapsed.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
I’ve been visiting https://recleague.com/ a lot lately. It’s the only non-ad slopped place I’ve found for discussion on non-techy topics with a mostly non-tech crowd. It’s more arts and culture and fashion people but without the heavy advertising focus of Instagram.
I don’t post that much, and it’s not a whole lot of discussion going on. But it does feel more like the old web. Cozy like. My favorite recs are the ones that are experiences rather than products. Things like “dunking an Klondike bar in your coffee to make a gas station affogato.”
Might be of interest to you as well @lostwax
I just checked this out at your recommendation and it feels like it's advertising that I unwittingly stepped into. How do you find more experience-oriented recs?
I mean it is mostly recommendations for tangible stuff you can buy, people just keep it interesting with personal experiences interspersed in. Otherwise you kind of follow people, the parenting and DIY tags tend to be more experience oriented. But the general experience is supposed to be akin to paging through a newsstand magazine which are mostly glossy ad spreads.
The reason is pretty much the same reason Reddit isn't working for you either. Most comment sections just devolve into either jokes or flame wars between the .ml users and everyone else. The few communities that are free of those things are too small to have serious discussions. It's unfortunate, because I like the idea of a decentralized, federated social network like Lemmy, but I think it doesn't quite work.
You mentioned Twitter, so maybe you'd like Bluesky or Threads? I don't personally use them so I can't say for sure if they'd meet your requirements, but I never understood Twitter either.
What is .ml? I gather that it's lemmy.ml but I don't understand what's unique about it.
Yeah, they were definitely referring to lemmy.ml and likely the few other similar instances (lemmygrad, hexbear). I think that they are exaggerating the claim that "Most comment sections just devolve into either jokes or flame wars", but it happens enough on the large communities (i.e. subreddits) that it is annoying. The Fediverse reddit-likes (MBin/Lemmy/Piefed/etc) have a lot of balkanization issues, it isn't just the .ml related instances. I find it easy enough to avoid that stuff on there, but one point I agree with is that they don't have a large enough user base to support good and frequent discussions on niche topics. Reddit, for all its many faults, had a ton of people so that even wacky niche communities could form.
The members of Lemmy.ml (and several other associated instances) hold some very pro
IsraelIran, pro-Russia, pro-China views. This tends to lead to very unproductive back and forth "discussions" between them and the Western userbase.This is mostly relegated to political/world news style posts in the larger communities, so if you stay away from those, you'd probably never notice it.
Did you mean to write pro-Iran? The .ml userbase is certainly not pro-Israel, it is largely comprised of leftists who are more critical of Israel than anybody.
Anyway I don't see those unproductive discussions too often, it is more common to see comments mocking the imagined position of .ml users.
Yes, my mistake. I got it mixed up.
There are instances that are pro-Israel/Zionist (e.g. lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.world) and they're also pretty bad about moderation and commenting with regards to Israel.
It's referring to two particular Lemmy instances that are on .ml domains. Lemmy.ml (run by Lemmy's developers) and Lemmygrad.ml. Both are basically full of tankies. They were the two biggest instances on Lemmy before the Reddit API protests and subsequent exodus put the fediverse on the map.
I recently found out about the indy web revival project. And I was extremely excited by it. There's an actually reasonably large user base creating really awesome late 90's and 00's style websites and all linking to each other.
Seems like the core of these is neocities and nekoweb as hosting platforms and you can discover sites from other sites/web rings just like the old days.
Many of the sites have mailboxes and/or chat rooms, there's lots of forums and activity. I'm really excited to dive in to be honest but I've been kinda busy/stressed recently with work/life to find the time.
Edit: If you're interested, it seems like old school sites kicked off again during covid around 2020, then there was a huge resurgence around 2023 and they've been riding the wave ever since.
Webrings are fun! We made our own one with a few friends and it even got somewhat popular in the Russians-speaking tech space, though it's mostly personal homepages
Not sure if it's entirely what you're looking for but I've had decent luck on automotive discussion forums. bimmerpost.com is one I frequent since I own an M2 and they have vehicle specific subdomains to find focused discussions on your specific model. People sometimes do devolve into memes and nonsense but people are mostly helpful.
In a similar vein, has anyone had any positive experience with closed communities which aren’t accessible without an account? The particular problem with this type of community is it’s hard to know which ones are active because by their nature they are hidden. I do wonder if this is the future though, what with bots crawling the internet at large.
The Something Awful forums are still around, as are Cook’d and Bomb’d, and Drowned in Sound.
The traditional ‘forums’ structure lends itself much better to conversations and in-depth discussions, IMO.
A lot of communities around FOSS projects exist as Matrix channels. In practice I think of Matrix as roughly analogous to a decentralized version of Discord or Slack. You can pick a Matrix server (or host your own) to create an account on, and then you can join channels that have been created on any other Matrix server to chat with the users there. I think it's very unlikely to ever gain the kind of momentum or adoption that Discord has since there's a fair amount of friction to sign up and figure out the different server/client options and more obtuse UX.
So far I haven't actually found any active communities aside from a handful of FOSS projects using it as a low-traffic support forum for users to ask questions and help each other figure stuff out, but I imagine it's possible there are more active channels on there somewhere that might be worth hunting down.
Yeah, a lot of people in HN comments with Redditor Syndrome lately. Submissions are still pretty good.
You say you stopped using Discord, but you don't go into any detail. Was Discord as a whole not doing it for you when it comes to communication, or was this more of a principled decision? There is a lot to dislike about the platform and the company, but the "community" is just a million little (or not so little) silos. Surely it is probable that there are a few containing people you would enjoy talking to?
I think Discord is still good in some respects. There are definitely still communities worth interacting with on there. One big reason I left is I'm just not a fan of the messaging format; conversations get lost so easily that it feels like a very ephemeral medium. Small servers often have a slightly exclusive atmosphere, and in larger servers there's too much going on at once. The other reason is seeing the writing on the wall as far as the future goes for the platform; I think pursuant to the IPO it will be a long downward trend in terms of quality.
Unfortunately I don't think the scale of the Internet permits communities exactly like the ones we had 20 years ago anymore. They all must strike a balance between openness and, to be blunt, not sucking. Any open forum will be fighting a relentless, exhausting war against bots, 24h/day, as well as low effort content. Any closed forum is exclusive by nature... Even Tildes is using invites to control access (and certain technological decision, I guess), but more than that, I think Tildes is somewhat protected by its obscurity.
Hacker News was really fun and relatively intimate before Arrington wrote about it for TechCrunch. Even for a few years it felt small.
For the fediverse, small instances like the forkiverse are fun because everybody knows everybody. That always does off as it grows, but instances under 5k tend to have a good feel.
https://discuss.pixls.us is really nice for FOSS photography discussion. (down at the moment)
Groups.io is the only Internet service I find good discussions on these days. It's essentially email reflectors of long ago, with a web interface for those who would rather browse conversations than receive emails or email digests. Much like classic email reflectors, there is ownership and moderators, and most of the bad stuff one sees on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is squashed. Of course this all varies by group, and groups are usually very focused on a specific area, topic, or hobby. However, I still find myself sticking around Facebook for groups for certain hobbies. I really wish I could leave FB for good because it's a cesspool for bots, advertising, manipulation by foreign/enemy states, and political rage bait.
Perhaps I'm just an old guy complaining, but I think the Internet would be a much better place if we went back to the days of email reflectors.
Most of the content I engage with is on Substack. Text-focused discussions on whatever you care about. Maybe someday u/skybrian will pick back up his AI blog. Though my vote is for culture/political writing; I find his perspective to be be uniquely cogent and insightful.
Some of the biggest substacks are big for a reason; if you want a start, I recommend Bentham's Bulldog and Scott Alexander as they should be of interest to the kind of person who frequents here.
Thanks!
I found that finishing a blog post is too much work. My substack has many drafts where I sketched an idea, but I would never feel like going back and finishing them. Sharing links and writing a comment in a few minutes seems to be about all I can manage, so microblogging would be about as much as I can do, and a Substack isn’t really the place for that. On the other hand, Bluesky’s 300 character limit is too short.
There is one skill you have that I am envious of: you seem to know how much we should care about something. How much should I care about Jan 6th? White House UFC stadium? The anti-weaponization fund? (my guess for you is "a lot", "not at all", "some")
I feel like I don't even know where to turn for sober analysis of what's going on, other than following random people online like yourself who seem sane. I just need to know the reasons to care/not care about The Latest Thing™ everyone is worried about.
I usually share a link when there’s something about the news story that makes me feel like I learned something surprising and it changed how I think about the world, at least a little. I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as significance.
Many things the Trump administration does are horrible but no longer surprising. At one time they would have been very surprising.
I also don’t follow the Ukraine war in detail anymore, other than changes in technology.
I spend a fair bit of time on Discuit, and still lurk on the near-defunct Hubski. The latter doesn't really qualify, but it once did, and its archives are worth reading. I've gotten the impression there are lots of small discussion communities that don't broadcast their presence much, so it's mostly word-of-mouth to get hooked in, much like here.
I don't mind this state of affairs - I feel like the price of central convenience like large social media sites is... well, everything that's gone wrong with every one that got big, rotted, and either died or has been turned into a value-extracting automated zombie by corporate interests.
Since you are a mathematics student I suppose you know of r/math, don't you? it is definetly a decent subreddit.
In the same vein, can someone here send me an invite to lobsters? I hope this isn't against the rules there or here.