No one of any real purpose or substance should be using Twitter, at all, and really that should have become apparent years ago.

Disco and Slack have been my go-to for some time, though I've been connecting more and more with local devs at pub meets because online discourse is just dire at the moment.

I've found that layoffs and RTO have multiplied the toxicity of development communities. People will openly threaten to call your HR department if you say something wrong. Developers and engineers aren't trying to get better, they're just harming each other in a loop until the most evil one survives. It's cut-throat but not even in a good way, just extremely anti-social and aggressive.

I don't recommend any development communities. If you want to try Discord, many people who will try to get you fired are available to chat with. I talk with long time friends who are developers but it's mainly really sad conversations.

I'm only a casual dev but I see a lot of chat on Reddit, or Lemmy, the fediverse alternative. There's tech folk also using Matrix.

I think that X was the big web dev community, and as soon as it was taken over by rocket man, people scattered to the wind. I think most, however, didn't actually go anywhere and just decided to be less social.

I browse my LinkedIn feed (yeah, I know) and I often see discussions pop up between people from my network, albeit nowadays it's mostly about AI tools.

I see discussions pop up on /r/webdev on reddit, but not a super active subreddit.

on 4chan there used to be /wdg/ (maybe there still is, but i haven't been to that website in years at this point)

I bet a lot of discussions happen on Slack servers for specific frameworks, but I don't have a lot of experience with using those except asking questions in the #questions channels

Twitter, still.

Despite several attempts to move off, the center of gravity is still there.

There is a very large presence over at Mastodon when it comes to people well versed in web standards. The public discussions are often very lively (in a good way).

> Are web devs more old-school, posting on bulletin boards and forums? Or is X still the answer, and I'm just getting aggressively packed into a different bubble?

> … Or is it all realtime communication, like Slack and Discord, these days?

Yes to all.

Friends + threads like these!

Try doing a search for key terms on xcancel or another proxy.

Unless you originally started using the account for tech purposes, it can remain a minor part of your bubble, with an inaccurate targeting of your niche technical interests.

Everywhere... I have seen good devs on Reddit, Discord, Mastodon and even IRC.