What are some of your favorite communities that feature topics like literature, science, ecology, aerospace, technology, politics, history, arts, culture, theory, and debate?
Where do responsible, respectful adults go for discussions and for substantive, high quality posts and comments by decent human beings?
(Not just limited to academic/intellectual topics, could be anything from hobbies to defense contracts to careers to skills. Just looking for respectful, reasonably intelligent, informed, relatively engaged communities.)
Also, are forum aggregators like Lemmy and Reddit even the best places to find such communities outside of listservers, universities, and academic conferences?
I don’t disagree. I believe that systems not relying on trust, if cleverly designed, can be simultaneously robust, selective, and autonomously correcting. That being said, the forum format itself, while having inherent drawbacks, is my preferred version of the modern commons for different reasons. It’s not the Platonic ideal of the digital commons, nor, hopefully its last iteration, but I’m hoping Lemmy produces superior communities to Reddit, for instance, simply due to their diversity and decentralized governance.
I applaud your optimism. And you’re right. The design of the fediverse encourages these properties. But there are also other dynamics at play.
I wouldn’t describe Lemmy as an intellectual place. It’s more a cross-sectional take on society. It’s a diverse place of common folks, a few nerds, people posting the news, sharing memes or asking questions…
It depends a bit on the specific community. Some have nice people and active conversation, some don’t. Especially niche topics are a mixed bag. We’re just 50.000 active users so that means for some smaller hobbies you can’t really get a conversation going. But you included some broad topics. I’m sure some of them work well here.
!technology@beehaw.org regularly has good posts. Debate and politics work very well all across the platform… I’m not really an expert on the communities here, I hope other people can give good recommendations. Art, literature and ecology also have healthy communities. Sometimes entire instaces dedicated to it.
I think if you’re willing to share this place with a diverse group of people, you can get happy here.