Comment by mattkevan
2 days ago
Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today.
Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it].
Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else?
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.
> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]
Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
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Xtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.
It's not all that hard to curate a feed without that stuff. Block people who annoy you, mute words/phrases that annoy you, and follow people you enjoy.
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Curious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems like it was being algorithmically pushed, especially during the DOGE days. But I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall.
Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
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Against the grain here but I feel like it needs to be popularised. But have you considered trying to do it in person? Going to shared spaces, meetups, etc and talking to people.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
Meetups tend to have huge backlogs for speakers. Tried it in a couple and they said 8 months at least.
I've found Mastodon to be the best platform for this in 2026. If you're working on something deeply technical, there is a good chance the upstream maintainers for whatever you're using and tons of academics in the field will be active on there. Except maybe for something LLM-related, that's still firmly in the Twittersphere, even in 2026.
I think the best way to do this today is having your own site, be it in the shape of a blog, digital garden or whatever and then syndicate, following POSSE[0], in case of wanting community or distribution.
[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
Yeah. You can follow microformats and use Bridgy to syndicate to BlueSky and Fediverse
Niche forums are still alive and well.
I run a blog and like to write about projects but it's hard to get feedback there unless you're willing to moderate comments. As a work around I started sharing build threads on places like garagejournal and you can get a lot of good feedback.
I think YouTube can be a good place for it, probably supplemented by a simple website.
Example, Pete's Garage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQFlaDhWsck
Hackaday is still pretty cool if you're into technogadgets and the like
For sharing digital creations, X is still the #1 place to do it for visibility and discovery. I get a surprising amount of positive interactions there.
I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.
> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
I’m building a new product design app that is made from the start for design systems and agentic collaboration. Tried posting about it a few times in the UX design sub as I thought it might be interesting to fellow designers, but they all got deleted by the mods for unspecified reasons even though I was careful to follow the rules. Gave up in the end.
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Subreddits for other programming languages see the same issue, too much slop.
I don't bother submitting to reddit. I would say if you want to post anything substantial, as in something with multiple posts, to reddit, it should be on your own subreddit. Only allow posts and comments by approved users though.
I crosspost to LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. LinkedIn is the most effective.
I also blog, but POSSE is not as good as it could be.
Mastodon and blog both sound good to me. For some, they could alternatively use twitch or youtube.
Isn't twitch or YouTube live the obvious sort of way?
I would begrudgingly suggest LinkedIn. I have seen a bunch of professors doing it there successfully. There they also promote their Substack which LinkedIn allows. I remember Elon had banned Substack on X at one point.
It's probably still Twitter.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I don't know how publicly you mean, but I do this on the maker community I'm a part of (shout out to our general maker newsletter, sign up at https://www.themakery.cc/ for fun links).
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
Does substack have a built in community like that? I thought you really needed to get people there or use it for the newsletter feature.
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It was called Twitter for 17 years before being renamed in 2023. The Twitter domain still redirects to roughly the same site it was for all those years.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
Cause X is a stupid name
And twitter isn't?
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> everyone
Surely this claim cannot apply to all humans who refer to that social media service. There are multiple potential competing explanations that have nothing to do with virtue signalling. For many, particularly non-users or rare users, “Twitter” is a more familiar name. Personally I don’t like the new name; and since it’s not a person, dead-naming it causes no one any harm or offence. Twitter, X - if one’s interlocutor understands that you’re both referring to the same service, what does it matter in casual circumstances?
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X doesn’t even allow for non-logged in users any more, forget about the blatant racism from its owner and occasional child porn. Who even knows what algorithm it uses to show content any more. Anyone still posting there is either wildly ignorant or completely ok with this, and in either case it’s hard to value anything they say.