When I first got into computers back in the eighties it was so fun, but I was mainly by myself. There was no internet at the time, it was just me, my Tandy 1000, DOS, and Kings Quest. I spent many days playing with "for" loops and "goto" statements.
Later it was Windows95 and "Yahoo! Chat", I started meeting other nerdy types. It was fun to finally talk to folks with the same interests, lord knows no one in school was interested. Then there was ICQ and finally I ended up using mIRC for IRC. I stayed in IRC land for a long time and was surrounded by nerdy types. Oh what fun we had as I eased into Linux during the late nineties.
Then there was the beginning of the social media era. I think it was Facebook I was first on, and it was all the people who weren't geeks on again, it was like being back in school. None of these peopel were proper nerds. I did still have IRC. Then Google had Google+ which all the nerds flocked to. I really enjoyed the Google+ days, to this day I feel it was one of the coolest social networks.
As time went on I ended up on Twitter, now X. Twitter was ok, not the greatest, but a lot of tech folk were there. The conversations never were quite as geeky. It was enough to keep me entertained though. As i'm thinking of this, all these years, forums were always a place of solace, but the people visiting them slowed down quite a bit. And now X is a shell of the old Twitter.
Mastodon came on and it is a decent place for the nerds to congregate, but there is a bit too much politics there, people hate other people just for their opinions. It's downright hostile at times. And now we have BlueSky which is basically X but alot of the nerds moved there. It is also pretty hostile. But not hard to navigate, they have pretty good moderation tools.
Finally, there is Nostr, which is basically the wild west, but its technically the coolest of them all. It has quite a few techies on it, but loaded with bitcoin folks. The protocol itself is nerdy enough that I hope the geeks move there. At the same time it's pretty Free Speech and all, a big libretarian vibe, so a lot of the hostile political nerds probably wouldn't want to be there.
In general, being a nerd just isn't as fun anymore. Most of the new hardware doesn't allow as much tinkering, and the people are more hostile and political about everywhere. It's hard to find a place where geeks could be geeks. People need to stop making up reasons to hate eachother and just break things so we can fix them. The world is such a better place with a lot of tinkering. Maybe it will turn around someday.