Best online communities and forums for specific hobbies in 2026

[Shane96]

Reddit has been degrading for a few years and a lot of niche hobby communities have migrated elsewhere. Curious where people here have found the best communities for their specific interests in 2026. Whether that is Discord servers, dedicated forums, Lemmy instances, or something else entirely. What communities have you found that are genuinely worth participating in?

[Clever Wrench]

Woodworking forums have largely stayed on dedicated forum software and the quality of discussion is dramatically higher than anything I have found on Reddit. The lack of karma gaming changes how people write

[Phil80]

Photography communities on Flickr are still better than Instagram for actual discussion. The audience is smaller but they are there because they like photography, not because they want followers

[Grover26]

The hardware modding communities on Discord are excellent for niche stuff. Keyboard, gaming controller and retro hardware modding scenes are incredibly active and the knowledge sharing is generous

[DodgyCoder]

Hacker News is still the best single place for technology discussion despite everything. The average comment quality is higher than any equivalent and the norms suppress the worst behaviour

[JustMartin]

Amateur astronomy has a strong dedicated forum ecosystem that predates Reddit and never really migrated. Deep Sky Observers and Cloudy Nights are both worth knowing about