I too prefer forums over news aggravators with comment trees.

I still get most of my news via RSS. Lemmy is my sole social media usage. I use Matrix every day but see it as very different to IRC for some uses. Forums are useful but much of the tech content you find via search engines is out of date. Also not all forums are created equally. The new KDE forums have a major shortcoming compared to the old version.

openscad looks ancient and works awesomely

dar (Disk ARchive)

uMatrix browser extension. It has been marked archived by Gorhill, last release is two years old, you are supposed to just use uBlock [Origin]. However, it still (luckily) works fine and is exactly what I want. (Sure, I won't install this for my parents.) The GUI to simply choose what you want the site to be allowed to do is perfect.