| Real world meetups about subjects you're interested in will have better value than most online stuff. Read books about things that interest you, and use Goodreads as a source of inspiration for future reading material. Get off Facebook. Either learn to optimize Twitter as someone else suggested, or get off there too, because it's easy for it to become an echo chamber if you aren't smart about how you use it. I prefer Mastodon because if you choose a good instance there's less fluff and you're not funneled into your own echo chamber. Where possible, I use special-interest-focused-forums (yes, old-fashioned forums still exist) instead of Reddit. Again, some parts of Reddit are good, but a lot have horribly biased moderation. It depends on the subject. Start a blog and link it to your social media. I've found participating in blogging challenges has helped me build readership and find new blogs to read, and those blogs have helped me find meetups or conferences in subjects I'm interested in. Some of those have required travel, but the travel has been worth it. |