Hare is interesting.

We have a community for it on this instance, here. But it’s currently dead and unmoderated.

Thanks, I’ll keep all that in mind. It’s something I’m hoping to get out of the Fediverse too. I just need to push myself to be more active, rather than just passively consuming.

How have you gone about making friends on the platform? I checked it out, but found it a bit isolating. Surely that’s on me rather than the platform, so I’d like to hear of your experience.

I don’t disagree, I do think there are too many communities for the number of active users (both here, and Lemmy in general). What I’d be interested to know is this: Is there some research into the subject, or even a write-up from someone who has successfully grown a thriving community in the past?

I’d argue that with [email protected] being the “default” community, this is somewhat mitigated. It’s not policed, so you can post there about Rust, Godot, Python, or whatever you like and nobody will moderate you or ask you to move along. Maybe the “over-dilution”, as you call it, hurts the instance as a whole. But if you think of Lemmy as something wider than a single instance, it matters less. [email protected] is the flagship instance here, and it’s a large one by Lemmy standards. People will subscribe to that from all over the Fediverse.

So I think it comes down to your view of programming.dev as an instance vs Lemmy as a network of federated communities. Ultimately, people will just subscribe to whatever instances interest them - and hopefully Lemmy as a whole will thrive, including this instance.

Yes, no long commuting has slashed my podcast listening time too. I now only listen to them on the school run (if my son wants to listen too), or during chores.

My favourite three are:

• Darknet Diaries
  I imagine this one is familar to most podcast fans that might stumble upon this post. The host is a fantastic interviewer, storyteller and producer. He interviews incredibly interesting people and shares their stories about all things dark net: hacking, social engineering, dark web, darknet markets and more.

• Self-Hosted
  A podcast about all things self-hosted. The two hosts are passionate self-hosters who like to discuss open-source solutions, self-hostable products and technical setups. They are highly experienced and have a ton of useful information to share. They have great guests on the show, and have built a brilliant community around the topic.

• Coding Blocks
  A general software engineering podcast. I find some episodes a bit hit or miss, but the three hosts are hilarious, informative and very entertaining. You can tell they are three very close friends who absolutely vibe off of one another. They cover all sorts of topics including programming languages, development tools, books, conferences, frameworks, companies and more.