Smaller communities won't be as active, but discord servers have been great for talking with like minded people about hyper-specific things. The thing I like ab

Smaller communities won't be as active, but discord servers have been great for talking with like minded people about hyper-specific things. The thing I like about discord is that even if the main server seems pretty general, they have channels and those tend to get much more specific. It's up to the community how real time it feels. I know some servers that have global interest and there's usually someone to talk to regardless of when you ask a question. On the other hand I have also noticed servers where it's becomes obvious who is on EST vs PST. Google groups hasn't been the main method of communication for a while. There's discords for TV shows and Games, but I also see discord for development projects. Some even use patreon and have discord access as a subscription benefit where the developer posts beta builds. For example, Uberduck https://uberduck.ai/ https://uberduck.ai/ has an pretty active discord for developers. Uberduck have a free tier when you can synthesize TTS that sound like well known voice actors or singers. https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-reference&voice=cave-johnson https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-reference&voice=cave-... And it has a paid tier if you want to clone your own voice. EleutherAI's discord has a similar healthy discord community. GPT-NeoX talk there. Two Minute Papers , the youtube channel run by Dr.Károly Zsoln has its own unofficial discord as well. Unofficial but Dr. Károly Zsoln has shared a twitter linking to it, so he is aware of it. Lichess.org has a discord server. I can't promise if your hyper-specific interests will have discord server dedicated to it, but there's many. In fact my university has a specific server for CS and Math and you can ask for help, and from the last time I checked, specific professors do come and answer questions, although more likely it's other classmates.