> Where do you go for casual interactions with a broader range of tech-ish folk across disciplines?

I go here.

I briefly scan X maybe once a week, but its a firehose of brainrot and view farming. My Bluesky feeds seem very politically angry and they talk about Elon more than people do on X. I feel for the anger, given the situation in the US, but it's just not mentally healthy. Mastodon is that, but worst -- share any non-mainstream thought and your replies are full of haters. I follow "famous" tech people and engineers, if it matters.

In many ways, I like it better this way. I'm forced to be bored more, and when I get the urge to check X or something, the mess that it is, curbs that pretty quickly.

A lot of noise only works if you have a huge audience.

Meta's gemma team was on X recently looking for advice on MOE and reasoning for gemma.

Qwen announces on X: @Alibaba_Qwen or @JustinLin610

Basically all of linux and programming happens on X.

discord for sure has discussions. LM studio pretty much only exists there. Reddit is most just dead internet at this point.

Freenode's hostile takeover during covid pretty much ended irc. An official end to the IRC era.

>Where did they go? I have found a few, but not many, on Mastodon and Bluesky.

The USA dominates tech to be sure, so the USA political polarization would disproportionately impact this sure. But it was temporary as mastodon and bluesky declined and everyone seems to be back to X.

w.r.t. to Twitter - I was early on Twitter in 2007, deleted the account and just restarted my Twitter last week. Thankfully, got my old handle @cyrusradfar.

Folks shared there's a lot of tech folk on there. I haven't engaged yet but am building up the energy to try. Wish me luck :)

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