Everything else that I care about is in private Signal groups or an equivalent of same with anywhere from 15 to 200 people, and adding any new member means they need to be vouched for by an existing one. And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.
I can't even imagine trying to engage with people on something like x/twitter or other social media. Not knowing whether the 'person' you're replying to is somebody's LLM authoried bot farm.
Tbh, my experience with _that_ has been worse than with a random sample of internet background radiation, as people seem to have no idea how to filter correctly and who to vouch for and why.
_Especially_ with people they know via work, conferences, etc. Spaces that do not filter for "genuinely relevant contributer to a conversation" at all, but encourage faking that.
At a certain scale you know who the people are that have super-admin privileges at very specific ASNs and they are well known in the industry. Basically much as somebody in academia in a journalism school on the west coast would know who is the department head of the school of journalism at a major university in Boston or NY and recognize their name.
Now within a Signal group of 150 people adjacent to the neteng teams at large to medium sized US/Canadian ISPs, it's entirely possible that somebody let an uninvited rando in, but we don't discuss anything super sensitive (that's for more 1:1 messages). A person who has been lurking for weeks or months and suddenly starts chatting in an inauthentic way would be found out very quickly.
One of the things that ISP technical operations groups do very well is filter for non-authentic participant in something, because sales persons getting into groups of technical discussion with the angle of selling some new thing is a perpetual problem and is a well known factor to deal with.
Also sales people generally don't do well when a complex operational-related technical matter is put in front of them in a fast paced environment where they can't engage their engineering team to get an accurate reply. Ask anyone that's ever tried to get their direct cellphone number removed from a Cogent IP transit sales person's CRM system....
I know the kind of space you are referring to. I'm in those too. But my point is that they regularly disappoint me.
Which is usually worse disappointment than with randoms on the internet, because the people should know better but don't.
With these tight knit spaces you get all the social dysfunctions of people liking each other not for merit but because they've been around each other for long, and that's - for me personally - worse than the public alternative, as you suddenly do not argue with logic, but with the tribe and social cohesion.
I have a theory that a good part of the filtering for authentic humans has already been done here, which gives me a higher level of confidence that I'm not metaphorically shouting into the void by conversing with somebody's LLM or social media influence apparatus.
My mental health improved significantly. I actually feel valuable at work. I feel pride in contributing to my local community. And the paycheck isn't actually worse.
Which might be a winning strategy, but also might not be.
One of the great things about not having ads on rangerovers.pub is that Google is just not interested in indexing it, because it doesn't make them any money. It shows up here and there in search results, sporadically, especially if you know a username or phrase specific to the site, but other than that if you want to know about it you need to be told about it.
I was never a fan of web forums but they are a nice compromise between really oldschool mailing lists and FAANG content-to-eyeball transformers.
I guess there's at least 3 or more active and currently developed software packages with open source licenses, the flaskbb that site uses, simplemachinesforum, the classic phpbb, probably some others I've forgotten about... The LAMP stack dependencies for all seem very mundane and very lightweight.
On a site like HN, blocklists are very effective at keeping people off your feed.
I can also highly encourage people to keep notes and do some basic OSINT. The effective internet is smaller than one might think, so that proves useful time and time again.
If something seems _odd_, I suggest looking up _why_ it might be odd. Gathering context, essentially.
Like "Okay, this guy is weird. Aah, okay, LinkedIn says that he works there. Okay _now_ that makes sense".
Based on that, you can then decide how to approach the (previously failing) interaction.
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HN is a very easy place for that, because, to give somewhat concrete examples, if someone is shilling for something and seems unreachable for common sense, LinkedIn usually tells you that their salary depends on that.
And people play very open here, because this is treated as a business networking event.
Not sure why that makes any difference - I've had plenty of arguments on Facebook with people who are perfectly happy to spew racist and/or conspiratorial bullshit while having their full names, their holiday photos and photos of their children and/or grandchildren attached to their identity. The weird thing is that these people are 99/100 times incapable of actually having an argument, they either start insulting you straight away or say some variation of "if you don't like what I'm saying then leave" or actually majority of time "what does a foreigner like you know about this topic".
The real names policy has yielded zero of the promised effects imho.