My strategy has been to just go through the list of album reviews on pitchfork and try 2-3 songs from each. Write down the ones I think could grown on me.

Still looking for a review site with no numbered ratings.

Beehaw seems to make a fair bit of effort in providing communities for most common topics and providing content in a non-toxic and non-politically polarized environment. Would recommend alternatives in either of the two recommended instances.

Discord combines a lot of use cases in to one package. You get voice chat, modern chatrooms, video sharing/streaming, direct messages, group messages/calls etc.

But more importantly it operates on a paradigm where a user joining a “server” means you join all the channels automatically, and access to certain channels can then be revoked or gated instead of granted. This is the exact opposite of what, for example IRC had done (and what Matrix/Element still does to a large extent), and it fosters communities as one group of people can have an n amount text/voice channels dedicated to different conversational topics. This is very useful, even if it’s just for a friend group of 5 people. It is no wonder FOSS projects use Discord when it is so useful for it.

Ironically, what Discord does would work incredibly well as a decentralized system. I cannot believe it’s taking this long for the FOSS community create an alternative.

Rather than trying to persuade people to use either incompatible or insufficient alternatives, we must call people to arms and actually create an alternative. Matrix/Element is getting very close and we need more people improving the ecosystem.

Element still needs a UX overhaul and voice channels and the basic building blocks are already there then.