I have a friend who's thinking about checking out the fediverse, and is looking for more aerospace (& maybe mechanical?) engineering-focused spaces. Do you guys have a suggested Lemmy, Piefed, or Mastodon instance/community that focuses on those topics? Maybe even a STEM community could be good enough. I know most of us are tech nerds on here, but we're more computer focused tech nerds 😅

My only requirement is that the instance can be viewed without sign-in, as I don't want to force them to make an account to check it out.

Some very general space communities communities:

https://mander.xyz/c/space
https://sh.itjust.works/c/spaceflight

They are both pretty active by Threadi standard.

https://piefed.social/f/space@feddit.online

Mastodon: fediscience.org , that's for all kind of science. Sign-ups requirements are to give your ORCID (persistent identifier for scientist in case of name changes etc)

Lots of great STEM communities exist on mander.xyz, but it's an older and sometimes very slow Lemmy instance, so I would recommend accessing them via a more modern and far easier to use PieFed instance such as PieFed.social or PieFed.zip, e.g. no login needed to view https://piefed.zip/c/astronomy@mander.xyz.

• !aviation@lemmy.zip
• !aviation@lemmy.world
• #aviation tag on mastodon

Good list. What I love about these specialized spaces is they're built around shared interests rather than algorithmic engagement.

I think that's why projects like Zeitgeist resonate with fediverse folks - we're trying to measure genuine opinion, not engagement bait. If you can see people who care about aerospace, or science, or privacy talking directly without an algorithm reshuffling the conversation, that's the internet as it was meant to be.