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?
Phew… good question. It very much depends on your perspective I guess.
As an IT person I like it science, jokes and news but I also enjoy other things, not necessarily „professional“ but definitely not shitposting. If thats what you‘re after, you might want to look at everything on programming.dev, some stuff on lemmy.ml, a little bit on world and so on.
If you need even more formal I think you‘re out of luck atm since we‘re only at the discussion phase about a federated xing/linkedin. That would probably be more business oriented and rather formal/respectful.
Besides that, we are in a somewhat good situation atm - although my blocklist is now over 100 people so your mileage may vary.