Some apps (e.g. Voyager/Thunder) and web frontends (Tesseract? not sure which tbh) enable keyword filtering.

In the case of the apps, it’s found in settings under filters & blocks or filters, respectively. Unfortunately I can’t recall which web frontends enable it for sure, but I do remember there seemed to be fewer of them that did last I checked.

Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.

The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.

Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.

Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).

Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.

Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.

Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.

The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.

Keep an eye on !webrevival@lemm.ee, search via Marginalia Search, and check out the ooh directory among other things.

Also look out for webrings (or similar) on some of the sites you may find, as they can help you find other likeminded net people.

Some people are trying to bring back some of the old navigation methods, but with some improvements, to keep the open net around.

The thumbnail had me thinking this was some strange creature waving until I opened it and saw the good friends goofing about.

RIP, take my wheels away, I wiped out on the wheelie!

It weally was, I can’t believe I whiffed that wheelie

Aah, so I think Play Store is up to date but F-Droid isn’t, check again here: https://f-droid.org/packages/app.vger.voyager/

Unless this updates between me commenting & you checking (or browser cache is messing with me), it still shows v2.29.1 for F-Droid.

Checked the other day and it hasn’t gone up via F-Droid repo yet. I just downloaded the updated version from Github since it was bugging me.

I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.

Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.

You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:

https://lemmyverse.net/

If at all possible, I’d try to arrange for a break.

A lot of this sounds like it may stem from burnout (before getting into any more long-term conditions). Taking a break probably won’t help you see your job in a new light (some jobs simply suck, or aren’t a good fit for people personally), but it could give you time to rest enough to look for other opportunities. However first and foremost any such break should focus on resting and recovery to get you to a better state to just be well and happy.

Once you know you can sort out breaks and recover, you can set aside more time to look for opportunities. Right now it seems almost like this may be among your best options: carve out breaks for yourself to rest and recover. Once you’re feeling better, take time you’ve reclaimed for yourself to seek out opportunities to change jobs and improve your work situation.

Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation, & image upload limit is 500kb per image.

Source is instance sidebar, but if you’re using an app that’s gonna be found in a variety of places. In Voyager for example it’s under Communities>3 dot menu in the upper right>Instance sidebar.

Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).

Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.

Cult of Disney is eerily real. Maybe it’s the US version of how some Brits obsess over the royalty.

It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.

I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.

Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.

Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.

Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

Lately I’ve been casually researching a variety of things like usual, and remembering again that part of that needs to involve finding more international sources, like looking for the various research groups/centers in different countries to see what their approaches and results are.

I don’t really know where any of that would fit into any communities (CivilianScience? CasualResearch?), so here we are.

Besides that been doing the usual browsing around for more open web stuff and hey, NeoDB is cool! It’s federated software that “helps users to manage and explore collections, reviews, and ratings for various cultural products, including books, movies, music, podcasts, games, and performances.” So sort of like a hybrid Letterboxd/RAWG/Goodreads/etc. from the sounds of it.

I don’t think so. The largest ask communities, according to their own descriptions, say they’re for more open-ended questions, albeit AskLemmy@lemmy.ml seems to be more lax about it (and it seems like maybe AskLemmy@lemmy.world has kinda relaxed on it too).

There’s the newer !ask@lemm.ee that doesn’t have the open-ended part to their description, so might be a good fit.

It’s just a different Wafrn instance, which is why you couldn’t log into it.

As far as I’m aware it’s the first and only other Wafrn instance run by someone besides the creator of Wafrn. Hopefully in time there may be more.

Haven’t played it (probably in my wishlist), so I can’t help directly, but I can offer this: go ahead and ask the questions. If someone else around here has, then they can jump in to comment with advice and answers at any point in time later.

One of the perks of forum-style comms like this.