For a more structured thread/channel kind of thing, have a look at Zulip.

Mumble for voice groups.

Book Reader in f-droid. Keeps a nice catalogue for you, too.

The beauty of the fediverse is that you can have it all: mainstream adoption of the network, with as many niche servers as desired.

I like the ddg bangs too but I’m weaning myself off them, instead using keywords in Firefox. It’s really easy: just right-click (ctrl-click on Mac?) on a search field then select “Add keyword for this search”.

Especially since they started removing (censoring…?) bangs for the likes of Sci-Hub and torrent sites, and since I got thinking that perhaps they don’t need to know a history of all my searches on all the websites.

https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-site-bangs-to-avoid-liability-181203/