Formerly IRC, now Matrix, discord, slack etc, with a small community that actually likes each other is pretty good, but that's a shitty answer to the question, because invitation into these circles is almost always friend-of-a-friend.
The various rationalist spaces are at worst filled with pedantry, and at their best home to useful in depth discussions on very niche topics.
Some forums are good, but the majority seem to have a serious problem with the user base aging up and becoming very cliquish. I actually wish I knew why this clique behavior was so much more common on message boards than just about any other comms medium.
Reddit is mostly pretty bad, and as you mentioned seems to have poor moderation down to a near science. I actually think a lot of particularly bad mod practices and also common hostile mod-user interactions are driven by Reddit's global karma as a primary or secondary effect.
I still advocate for IRC. There are some really long running communities that are absolutely solid in my opinion. Maybe I'm just getting old but I find the discord structure and eco system to have too much chaos and trolls. Not all of course.
The freenode irc is a good place to start : chat.freenode.net they have probably the largest set of general and some specific channels for discussions. Good mods, rules etc.
But over the years of being on IRC and growing list of communities and friends I have a few that I join for particular areas of interest but as for an all in one 'directory' I'm not too sure if one exists.
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Formerly IRC, now Matrix, discord, slack etc, with a small community that actually likes each other is pretty good, but that's a shitty answer to the question, because invitation into these circles is almost always friend-of-a-friend.
The various rationalist spaces are at worst filled with pedantry, and at their best home to useful in depth discussions on very niche topics.
Some forums are good, but the majority seem to have a serious problem with the user base aging up and becoming very cliquish. I actually wish I knew why this clique behavior was so much more common on message boards than just about any other comms medium.
Reddit is mostly pretty bad, and as you mentioned seems to have poor moderation down to a near science. I actually think a lot of particularly bad mod practices and also common hostile mod-user interactions are driven by Reddit's global karma as a primary or secondary effect.
I still advocate for IRC. There are some really long running communities that are absolutely solid in my opinion. Maybe I'm just getting old but I find the discord structure and eco system to have too much chaos and trolls. Not all of course.
How do you find them?
The Libera irc network has a lot of active rooms with different topics.
Is there a way to discover new Libera chat channels beyond randomly joining different places?
On any IRC server you can list the channels created..
`/list` This will list all, but you can filter for min people for example in the channels
`/list -min 10`
The freenode irc is a good place to start : chat.freenode.net they have probably the largest set of general and some specific channels for discussions. Good mods, rules etc.
But over the years of being on IRC and growing list of communities and friends I have a few that I join for particular areas of interest but as for an all in one 'directory' I'm not too sure if one exists.