And don't forget the synchronous communities! All hackers have at some stage had a collection of friends in MSN, IRC, ICQ, XMPP, Slack, Discord, Mattermost -- something where they can regularly collaborate and talk among individuals with relevant interests.

Check out your local subreddits, find links to invites and start forming relationships with people you may never meet. Because more often than not, these are the people that will introduce you to concepts, jobs and cool shit you'd never find out on HN, Reddit or blogs.