DEV Community

Douglas Rogers
Douglas Rogers

Posted on

Where do devs go online to chat?

Aside from Twitter and Reddit, where else do developers to go chat? I've realized that I've just been in my own bubble, pounding away at my keyboard and I have not made many developer friends/buddies/communities. I have a few developer coworkers that I chat with from time to time. But where else is there for us to go to connect with one another?

Twitter contains so much noise that it's difficult to facilitate a conversation. Places like Reddit and Hacker News, to me, foster a bunch of bullies waiting to tell you that your post sucks or for moderates to delete your post because you said "I" too many times.

Are there Discord channels? Slack channels? IRC Chatrooms? (FYI: I've NEVER got a chance to learn IRC)

Lets discuss.

Top comments (5)

Collapse
 
joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot

I tend to find slack communities , for example there is one for Kubernetes with like 50K people on it. Its awesome. Also I think the devops reddit community have one too.. I just like it because I have all these communities on one platform vs going around sites like you mentioned Twitter, Reddit and others..

Collapse
 
bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News are all very meh IMO. Like you said, there is to much noise and bullies. I personally don't use Reddit, or Twitter with any regularity due to all the issues.

I've seen a lot of Discord and Slack channels advertised from different places, but I'd say its hard to find any generic "dev" ones, unless you find a channel specifically for one framework/thing it might be dead or empty.

Gitter is like a "nicer" IRC chat, came around before Discord, but again the rooms you get into might be active or might be dead, all really depends on how well its being promoted. (I personally go here the most, but I've seen things start slowing down in the rooms I'm in)

IRC is the OG, but I haven't used it so idk how it is, especially for web devs. When I think of IRC I think of old-school pro C programmers haha, but thats just my personal view.

(disclaimer this is a plug, but a relevant one) There's also FreeCodeCamp's forums, which have recently been making a push to overthrow Reddit as the place for developers to chat/interact. This push is recent, but it has the clear advantage over Reddit for being a much better/safer environment for discussions and getting help.

Collapse
 
moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Freenode IRC is full of very specific topic channels. If you can use slack, you can use IRC because slack is basically a copy of it. People are often very idle though.

If you like Twitter but don't like the noise, try mastodon. Well, it's a different kind of noise, anyway. There are plenty of instances that are populated mostly by developers.

Collapse
 
vickilanger profile image
Vicki Langer

Webwide is a really great place to hang out and mingle. There are forums for everything, challenges to test your mad skills, and a water cooler chat.

Collapse
 
standingdreams profile image
Douglas Rogers

Just joined. Going to check it out over the next few weeks. Thanks Vicki!