What are some of your favorite communities that feature topics like literature, science, ecology, aerospace, technology, politics, history, arts, culture, theory, and debate?
Where do responsible, respectful adults go for discussions and for substantive, high quality posts and comments by decent human beings?
(Not just limited to academic/intellectual topics, could be anything from hobbies to defense contracts to careers to skills. Just looking for respectful, reasonably intelligent, informed, relatively engaged communities.)
Also, are forum aggregators like Lemmy and Reddit even the best places to find such communities outside of listservers, universities, and academic conferences?
I don’t think you will find this Utopia online
That’s been my experience for 95% of Lemmy communities right now, though. I don’t know if it will last but for now, it seems pretty high quality.
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It was. But there were interesting effects from Reddit getting huge, like more niche subreddits and random encounters, like someone posting a proposal pictures and the targets of it being able to find it online. That probably wouldn’t happen on Lemmy.
Probably a worthy trade for better discussion and less bots, though.
I thoroughly enjoy MetaFilter (one of the last surviving community blogs from the 90s) and Tildes (a more recent attempt at capturing the same feel). Text-heavy discourse, minimalist design, human-scale moderation, and moderately gatekept (MeFi has a $5 fee, Tildes is invite-only). PM me if you’re interested.
This is what small forums with good moderators used to be, back in “the old days”. Modern forums (and Lemmy) just don’t have quite the same feel any more.
There used to be a website called WiserEarth (and then later Wiser.org). This was an internet utopia for intellectual, empathetic discussion about sociopolitical, environmental, ecological, and economic discussion. Really miss that community. But yeah, few. And far between.
Haven’t found IRL either
nor I found it in my dreams
DIY communities are pretty allright