From time to time I have the desire to discuss topics I am interested in with like-minded people, mostly stuff related to video games but different fields as well, and without having to be politically correct or having to call someone "they" or whatever the fuck. This seems to have become impossible on nearly all platforms.
Twitter? No comment.
YouTube? Heavily censored, nevertheless they are still allowing a few decent channels, but a lot creators have been forced to "self-censor" due to the ever present threat of demonetization.
Reddit? Some subs may still be relaxed, but KiA2 going private shows how dire the situation is, and it will only get worse.
Discord? Smaller servers can still be decent, but they hard to find and rare, the rest is full of woke normies and absolute filth. Even on gaming related discords one struggles to find decent people, and then there are still the moderators...
4chan? You won't get censored in most places, depending on the jannies of course, but most of the posts are of very low quality, a lot of spam, it is not a great experience for the most part.
I can't think of much else that is noteworthy, thus I'd like to know what you guys use and can recommend.
I've been looking at doing my own thing using InspIRCd behind my home VPN. It looks like there's potential to even encrypt IRC traffic on top of the VPN encryption. For those of you who don't know IRC it's old school tech and news orgs like to refer to it as the dark web to make it sound scary.
I think we're at a point where infrastructure needs to think about going back to the end user. We've had too much consolidation at the corporate level and taking the time to build your own system, secure it, and invite only people you know will really be the way to go. Any time you allow a lot of people in you'll inevitably get the commie/SJW crowd because they're usually trust fund kids and they don't have a job to go to leaving them all day to ruin your work.
I know IRC since it's still used in the Torrent community. But it's dying and there are reasons for that. Agreed on the last part, certain kinds of people have a vastly stronger presence because of this, usually the ones who like complaining about the "privilege" of others.
Every now and then I look into using retroshare which looks like it's a spiritual successor of the old WASTE software from the early 2000's. The thing I liked about that platform is you had to invite people, though if you invited the wrong people in it could destroy your group (which was a problem back in college when we were using it to share movies and music when someone invited some narcs).