Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.

AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).

SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?

I find a lot of good stuff in GitHub issues

Local meet-ups I guess?