I 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?

[1] https://programming.dev/post/23029