You're not going to find this in places. Youre going to find it in people. And even then, people promote themselves and politics is inescapable, but you can low

You're not going to find this in places. Youre going to find it in people. And even then, people promote themselves and politics is inescapable, but you can lower the amount of it you have to tolerate. I go to places that just have people there, not a board where a topic is the goal, but a network where interacting with people is the goal. Mastodon was good but isn't that great anymore because of constant political flame wars. Nostr is cool, a bit heavy on the bitcoin side of things but there's a lot of interesting technical discussion. Just anywhere that there are people, that the network or platform isn't topic specific, and that your experience isn't dominated by an algorithm. That way, you can curate the people you interact with based on your criteria. Personally it's Nostr for me, and I dabble on here because there are always a couple of interesting things to read about. I'm going to reiterate, try nostr out. I have a rule, if I can't read everything all my follows have said in the last 24 hours within 30 minutes I'm following too many people. That way I can keep up, but if I want to dive deeper in conversation I can. Also it keeps a bar of quality for you to curate. I avoid people with tons of follows and followers. A couple hundred follows is about the limit, a thousand followers is also. Those people just can't see everything they follow, they are there for status and their follower count is their golden bull. I avoid anyone that is constantly posting partisan political stuff, even if I agree with them. Every so often, hey what can you expect, people have ideas and express themselves, but people who are constantly Trump this Ukraine that are "problematic" and so I avoid interaction. Memelords... Everyone loves a good meme. Some people live for the memes, and it can be amusing for a while but if your feed/circle is nothing but memes it's just noise and not really engaging at all. Laughter is fun, chucklefucks are annoying after a while. Anyone that it feels to me like they're promoting I avoid. Selfies, shilling their company, drive by PRs to pad their CV for recruiters, web devs. It's great to talk about something youre building, or sharing a photo of a place you went, being proud of what you do, but there's a genuine quality that's hard to articulate that separates people just sharing their lives from self promoters. I stick to those rules and beyond that will engage with anyone. If you stay at it you'll find people to talk to, build a circle to discuss interesting things, even form friendships, though they'll never replace IRL loved ones. Some might even inspire you to build something cool, or you might even inspire them to do the same.