On Sunday, May 2, 2021 at 12:31:55 PM UTC-7, shannon...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, May 2, 2021 at 4:05:19 PM UTC+9, jimb...@gmail.com wrote: 
> [snip]
> > 
> > Another WWW victim was email lists. Some of the ones that were very busy in the 90s and early 2000s, such as Honyaku, are now only used by a handful of diehards. A Facebook page (shudder) has taken much of the action. I'm in a few Slack communities, which seem to work fairly well. 
> > 
> > Jim
> I've been following Discord and WT.Social a bit, but they don't seem too promising. I thought LessWrong looking interesting, but right now feel it's too elitist and censorious. I try to look at several new ones each year, but mostly I cling to ye olde Slashdot. Not for the discussions. I mostly like the feel of the editing software. Some of the rejects i can recall include WordPress, MeWe, and Ello. Twitter is a total loss, but sometimes I vent there. (Recently ranting against the filibuster. How about population-based cloture?) I resolved the Facebook problem with a 100-yen timer. Five minutes/day killed the engagement, and most days I don't even look at it.


I'm also one of the old timers from 2000-2002.  Interesting you mentioned LessWrong.  So a lot of people have felt as you do about that whole Rationalist movement and have formed a much better sort of community on Twitter generally referred to as Post-Rationalists (postrats).  Here are a few Twitter lists to check out that have most of the good folks in them:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/1502350251235192838/members
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1424348903785189378/members
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1400291334372659206/members
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1379232758279532546/members

Mostly non-political object level discussions by generally interesting smart people.