alt Hacker NewsI was looking for a Reddit alternative for quite some time, since the once lively communities that interested me have almost dried up, and their moderators seem to see their main role in preventing contributions rather than encouraging them. What I wanted instead was fairly simple: topic-based communities, titled posts, and nested discussions. I am interested in discussing programming languages and their implementation, not building a following. I could never really warm to twitter-style platforms, including their decentralised alternatives. I came across and tried programming.dev and did some research about it. My first impression was that it felt closer to what I liked about Reddit years ago. According to the attached paper and [1] I seem by far not to be the only one with this experience.
I wonder what experiences other users here have made. Do you consider programming.dev a suitable successor, or are there better recommendations?
I used Lemmy for a while and enjoyed the technical-focused discussions (although they did not have the volume of reddit).
In the more general channels, it turns out I made a poor choice of host server, because it was still federated with lemmy.ml. Some specific hosts have historical revisionist tankie viewpoints and make deliberately bad faith contributions to discussions.
It was interesting to see this from tankies since I usually see such behavior from the far-right. But "North Korea is an ideal state" loses novelty quickly, so it became frustrating to read discussions.