Heya!

The question is rather straightforward. Even though I said smaller, size doesn't really matter for this - the focus is more on the community aspect rather than it being small. Here's my non-exhaustive list (in no particular order):

1. Tildes - This is unsurprising. It's definitely large for a "small" community, but it's managed to preserve it's culture very well, which is rather impressive. It's cozy and has high quality discussion.
2. Various Discord servers and IRC channels. This one is harder to pinpoint, to be honest. As far as IRC channels/Discord servers goes, some of the more niche gaming ones are probably some of the nicest environments. IRC-wise, I really haven't managed to find any particularly active ones, outside of the ones for the next list member...
3. tilde.town and probably the larger tildeverse. Not affiliated with Tildes, but generally just... a nice place to be. It's rather quiet a lot of the time, but their main IRC channel is, frankly, quite great. When it's active.
4. A lot of Mastodon instances, although of course not all. The fediverse is generally a nice place to be, although politics on there is kind of mushy and one sided. Genuine interactions on there, however, are extremely common and sorting by the global timeline is quite nice (most of the time.)
5. rateyourmusic is a nice community of those who are passionate about music. It's quite nice overall, though.

There's definitely a lot I've missed out, mainly because I probably don't know about them.

So, what are some of the smaller (or not) communities that you enjoy?

So we have many communities and everyone gets free *nix shell access, you can ssh into the remote server (mostly ubuntu) and do whatever you want! I mostly go there to talk with other users.

It is all old school, we use the command line and there is no gui that you can work with. You have to use the cli for everything you do (easy to learn).

You can -

• learn programming
• make webpages
• make new friends
• play games
• learn more about *nix

and much more.

See https://tildeverse.org to get started. (https://tilde.team/wiki/?page=other-tildes for more tilde servers)

I'll suggest you to join ctrl-c.club or tilde.town and then try other servers. You can make account everywhere ofc. I am ~cyaniventer on tildeverse, see ctrl-c.club/~cyaniventer

Edit: Not related to tildes.net

The active development of Tildes and the feedback/discussions about features and mechanisms had me thinking. Is the conscious design and moderation of forums for public discourse a manner of social engineering?

I know the connotation of social engineering is usually negative, as in manipulating people for politics. But it's a double edged sword.

Most recently I was reading this feedback on removing usernames from link topics and while reading the comments I was thinking of how meta this all is. It's meta-meta-cognition in that we (well, by far the actual developers) are designing the space within which we execute our discourse and thinking. To paraphrase the above example: user identification can bias one's own impulse reaction to content, either to a beneficial or detrimental end, so how do we want this?

The moderation-influenced scenario is a bit more tricky because it can become too top-heavy, as in one prominent example many of us came from recently... But I think with a balance of direction from the overlords (jk, there is also public input as mentioned) and the chaos of natural public discourse, you could obtain an efficient environment for the exchange of ideas.

I'm not sure what my stimulating question would be for you all, so just tell me what you think.

For the past few years, I've grown more and more uneasy with Amazon's business practices. I think it's time to move on. Not to mention the declining quality in products since international shippers were added (as discussed in the podcast Reply All).

I'm addicted to the convenience of 2 day shipping, even though we use Amazon less and less, I like knowing I have that option.

I've been considering a Costco membership instead - how does their online shopping and shipping times/prices compare?

I've also considered using Jet more but I don't know much about their ethics, does anyone?

Open to other alternatives and discussion about business ethics here.