Idea #1: Join the WELL. Seriously, this, for your OP, might be closest. Conferences [1, 2] (each of which can contain many long running threads on particular topics) somehow related to tech include the following: ai.ind, biztech, cloud.ind, internet, linux, macintosh, mastodon, media, mobile, networking.ind, podcast.ind, radio, science, softare, telecom, vc, web, webservers, welltech, windows

Idea #2: Join the Indie Makers [3] community on Skool, as launched 51 days ago on Hn at [3]. This will be more about communicating about what you and others are actually hacking, on probably.

Idea #3: Whatever your tech niches are, they may have a community somewhere. Too bad if it is not just a "general tech discussion" location, though, as the niches do seem sort of silo'd and focused. Slack, Matrix, email-based mailing lists, and RSS feeds (of blogs, websites, podcasts, etc.) are several "places" the OP does not list. Tech discussion on focused areas does currently often seem to be on Discord, Slack, or Matrix, usually linked from whatever the central company or technology is that is focused on it (as linked from that entity's profile, website, page, Linktree, etc.).

  [0] https://www.well.com
  [1] https://www.well.com/all-featured-conferences/
  [2] https://www.well.com/conferences/independent-conferences/
  [3] https://www.skool.com/indiemakers
  [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40924936

I long for a social sounding board where people can have tech discussions with high availability across borders and with 0 politics

Where people don’t promote themselves and do it for the popularity, but for the true essence of discussion

Most tech discussions seem to be very smart people, exploring elegant ideas I don't have any background in, doing ASM and Forth and compilers and reading Knuth and general hacker type stuff, which is very different from what a lot of working devs talk and think about.

Like, it's really cool, but I'm not a mathematician, there's only so much time I want to spend engaging with anything to do with self hosted apps or deep dives on an instruction set.

Even in the FOSS scene the interesting stuff seems to be cathedral model.

People just do stuff and it suddenly shows up on GitHub with no discussion outside the group prior to that.

Tech discussions feel like somewhere of a circle you know what, and it's easy to feel like an outsider if you're not a hacker or mathematician(In the three tribes essay sense).

For a maker, LLMs are the biggest thing in coding since type hints getting popular.

They completely change how I code now that my typing speed is effectively unlimited and I'm never tempted to choose less best practicesy code to save a half hour of typing.

Most of the people I work with are hackers or mathematicians/code philosophers, and it seems like to a lot of them the whole industry is stagnant, they want new ideas, not cleaner repackagings.

I go to places that just have people there, not a board where a topic is the goal, but a network where interacting with people is the goal. Mastodon was good but isn't that great anymore because of constant political flame wars. Nostr is cool, a bit heavy on the bitcoin side of things but there's a lot of interesting technical discussion. Just anywhere that there are people, that the network or platform isn't topic specific, and that your experience isn't dominated by an algorithm. That way, you can curate the people you interact with based on your criteria. Personally it's Nostr for me, and I dabble on here because there are always a couple of interesting things to read about. I'm going to reiterate, try nostr out.

I have a rule, if I can't read everything all my follows have said in the last 24 hours within 30 minutes I'm following too many people. That way I can keep up, but if I want to dive deeper in conversation I can. Also it keeps a bar of quality for you to curate.

I avoid people with tons of follows and followers. A couple hundred follows is about the limit, a thousand followers is also. Those people just can't see everything they follow, they are there for status and their follower count is their golden bull.

I avoid anyone that is constantly posting partisan political stuff, even if I agree with them. Every so often, hey what can you expect, people have ideas and express themselves, but people who are constantly Trump this Ukraine that are "problematic" and so I avoid interaction.

Memelords... Everyone loves a good meme. Some people live for the memes, and it can be amusing for a while but if your feed/circle is nothing but memes it's just noise and not really engaging at all. Laughter is fun, chucklefucks are annoying after a while.

Anyone that it feels to me like they're promoting I avoid. Selfies, shilling their company, drive by PRs to pad their CV for recruiters, web devs. It's great to talk about something youre building, or sharing a photo of a place you went, being proud of what you do, but there's a genuine quality that's hard to articulate that separates people just sharing their lives from self promoters.

I stick to those rules and beyond that will engage with anyone. If you stay at it you'll find people to talk to, build a circle to discuss interesting things, even form friendships, though they'll never replace IRL loved ones. Some might even inspire you to build something cool, or you might even inspire them to do the same.

In conversation, listening is more important than talking. How enthusiast are you to talk about what other people want to talk about?

I can name on one hand the people I’ve come across who are good conversationalists

You're smart enough to run the numbers: if most people are boring or lacking intellect, odds are that is your lot too. Having good conversations is work. It requires charity and humility. It requires treating other intellects as peers.

If you want to have conversations, work at being a good conversationalist. Conversation is the point of conversation.

Depending on the technology you want to discuss, there might be Discord rooms/Slack channels available. For example the Golang Slack is pretty active and it’s easy to find people to talk to. I guess it’s the same for other languages

- what are you passionate about?

- do you work 40 hours? Do you earn enough to work less (32 hours, 30 hours across 3 days)

- what would you do with the hard earned time?

- what ambitions do you have?

A myriad of tech discussions to be had, changing the shape of work culture, the arts

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thank you, thank you, thank you

It's the perfect gift for someone like me with too much free time, and not quite coherent enough thoughts to try to code today.