Twitter’s dying, Reddit’s changing, everything else is entertainment – and there’s nowhere left to hang out.
Lemmy and kbin, find a community and stick with it or join a bunch. If you really don’t want to use discord for a hangout then there’s revolt and guilded for voip clients. You can also try mastodon and matrix, or really a combo of things.
I’m on discord but not for the sociability so much. However, there are some hyper specific subjects that get served up there. Personally, I find it very chaotic.
Discord is pretty similar to IRC 25 years ago: just a constant stream of conversations and you’re SOOL if you miss anything.
Discord seems to be sort of adapting to that? In the /r/iosbeta discord, they have topics that sort of act like reddit posts. But yeah, so far, I’m just all over the place. A couple of lemmy instances, Kbin primarily, and a lot of mastodon, with discord filling in when I’m bored. Although discord is very bad as a replacement for reddit/twitter, the nostalgia and it feeling very IRC is kinda nice.
The one thing Discord has over IRC is logging. If someone could develop an IRCv# with constant channel logging and a history like Discord, I would be there immediately.
There’s a learning curve with using federated platforms wether it’s Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon. Things will definitely improve as these platforms get more fleshed out but as is, it’ll probably come off confusing to a casual user.
To give Reddit and Twitter credit, they made it convenient to join communities as you just need a single account to interact with hundreds of thousands of communities and millions of people. It’s convenient as a user that you only need one account as opposed to 30.
If anything, we might end up reverting back to using smaller forums until the fediverse has time to catch up. I think it’s unsustainable as a business model and we’re seeing this with the self-destruction of both Reddit and Twitter where they’re leaning too far to try and make a profit where it’s affecting user choice and experience. Most people that ran web forums back in the day didn’t do it for the money but instead they wanted to foster a community. Yes going back to that might cause the internet to get a bit more fragmented, but I think it’ll work out for the best as both forums and the fediverse puts users first.