There are a few people on Hacker News I recognize, because they're often commenting on the same subjects: for example, pjmlp, lispm, kazinator, Rochus. Other people I recognize because they use their real names and they're famous: for example, steveklabnik and WalterBright. However, this is an asymmetrical relationship.

Edit: Hopefully this doesn't seem like I'm creepily stalking online strangers. I just notice their usernames a lot!

With Pearls extension on Chrome your post looks like this https://i.imgur.com/t6sdOGf.png

Now those fora are on Discord. In the servers I'm in, I too regularly recognize people posting.

Yeah discord and slack are the only places I recognize people anymore.

Reddit is a hellhole. I lived on Lemmy for a while and its really just as bad.. maybe worse because you have to deal with the insufferable open source hardliners.

For actual information, hacker news, rss feeds, podcasts, and medium posts are the only things I can stomach anymore.