Lots of interesting information is so fragmented in niche Discords. For instance, KoboldAI on merging and RP models in general, and some other niches. Llama-Index. VoltaML and some others in regards to SD optimization. I could go on and on, and know only a tiny fraction of the useful AI discords.
And yeah, /r/LocalLlama seems to be getting noisier.
TBH I just follow people and discuss stuff on huggingface directly now. Its not great, but at least its not discord.
Those rooms move too fast, and often are segregated good/better/best (meaning the deeper you want to go on a topic, the "harder" it is, politically and labor-wise, to get invited to the server).
Speaking of hard skills: how does one just hang out on a Discord server in any useful fashion? I lost the ability to deal with group chats when I started working full-time - there's no way I can focus on the job and keep track of conversations happening on some IRC or Discord. I wonder what the trick is to use those things as source of information, other than "be a teenager, student, or a sysadmin or otherwise someone with lots of spare time at work", which is what I realized communities I used to be part of consist of.
Discord is so time inefficient, its almost hilarious. For every incredible conversation between experts you observe, you have to weed through 200 times as much filler.
I also hang out on a few Discord servers: - Nous Research - TogetherAI / Fireworks / Openrouter - LangChain - TheBloke AI - Mistral AI
These, along with a couple of newsletters, basically keep a pulse on things.