Most of the communities in Beehaw have been pretty great for me. Good vibes and overall decent discussion in pretty much all of them. For memes 196 in the blahaj instance is my favorite.

This chat community has been great for random discussions. !linux@lemmy.ml has some fun discussions so far. I’m biased, but I participate in my own !campingandhiking@links.dartboard.social community

I really like the group here at Beehaw and I spend a little more than half my time on this account. I dislike the trolls and lack of a positive community on .world, but the number of active users on .world by itself is around triple that of beehaw. I’d rather have a conversation here, but if I have a highly technical question, I’m not as likely to get a response here. I mean stuff, like if I asked how cache memory is managed differently in current mainline Linux when the CPU scheduler is set to round robin instead of CFS for a pinned process on a CPU set with complete isolation, I doubt I would get a response here. I won’t post stuff like advanced functional 3d prints and designs or the depths of designing in FreeCAD because this place doesn’t have that level of granularity.

I’m afraid people here may not understand what defederation means here. It means you can see a lot of content where there are major conversations going on but you can not see them and they can not see you. Like I’m pretty sure .ml and beehaw are still federated. If someone on .ml creates a post, you can see it, comment, and interact only with instances your instance is federated with. There may or may not be a much larger conversation on the same post, but you can not interact with those people. There are a bunch of rude and PITA type people, but it is a question of what you are looking for.

I have accounts on both. I like beehaw peeps much more, but my core interests that really define me are not really here. I can explore other interests here though and broaden my horizons too.

I really hope this helps. If you are looking for more niche communities they are developing, but at a cost, and not as much here. There are bots, dead communities people started but don’t support. But like yesterday was the first big meme post on .world where it bled out into the periphery and was past 1.5k likes in a few hours… Someone asked “how can I stop pooping for 3 days, don’t ask why” in quite the eyebrow raiser. You can easily make an account on .world and check it out. The account creation process is automated with no effective wait.

Honestly, this one is probably my favourite right now. Everyone seems pretty cool, the content is engaging, and there are discussions happening in practically every thread. Everything you could want in a community.

None of them. I couldn’t find any communities for my interests and the more general ones I joined are boring. Also I have already seen the kind of ugly behavior you see on Reddit, for example people who come and brag about hating homeless people and get upvotes to the front page.