Active Chinese speaking communities outside China

[david387]

So I'm hoping to find some active Chinese communities where people are speaking Chinese, and hopefully busy communities where there's always someone there chatting so it's more of a real-time experience.

 

It could involve text messaging, or Voice messages, or even video, but I'm especially looking for something that is not controlled by the Chinese government.

 

Any suggestions?

 

And by the way, I have been exploring Facebook, but I feel a little bit like there may be some Chinese control going on there too but I may be wrong about that. In other words there are some large Facebook groups whose administrators are Chinese.

 

Now there are lots of communities where you can find people to chat with one-on-one but I'm looking more for something that is public where everyone can talk and chat together and there are multiple points of view being discussed because there are multiple people involved in that discussion.

[roddy]

Chat about what?

 

I suspect anything that's just a generic 'chat' group is ultimately going to attract the bored and troublesome. Why not look for a community you're somehow aligned with? Think in terms of communities of place (Chinese folk in your city swopping restaurant recommendations and advice on negotiating local bureaucracy), communities of practice (Rock-climbers, guitarists, accountants) and communities of circumstance (support groups for people with a particular illness, or coping with redundancy).

[amytheorangutan]

I expect if there is such thing in Chinese it would be underground so my suggestion that I can think of is to befriend lots of Chinese people and slowly find people who have similar interests as you and then ask those people if they know of such place. Unfortunately, this will take a long time to build those kind of relationships with lots of people before this kind of topics can emerge naturally as we probably can’t just ask random people that we know for 2 hours where to find the underground online community not controlled by Chinese government. 
 

I personally hardly ever find controversial subjects discussion on online public forum to be interesting or enlightening. Completely disregarding the censorship part, when you get a large groups of people online in any language with immensely different backgrounds who don’t know each other at all to speak about subjects that are considered sensitive or controversial, I suspect will turn into chaos and troll-y very quickly, unless the public forum has a kind of selection process either naturally (like a small niche forum that attract certain people only, like this forum) or artificially (only people with certain background like journalists etc can join) but then you might come across another issue where everybody just agreeing with everybody and creating an echo chamber.
 

I can’t think of any English public forum where people discuss hot button subjects and where it hasn’t turn into chaos or maybe I just don’t know where these forums are because I’m not particularly interested in those. 

 

I find I can have a more meaningful and enlightening conversation with different people one on one where you have time to get to know the other individual and why that individual think a certain way and have certain opinion, it’s never as simple as a few paragraphs because everybody’s opinion/view/stand is being moulded by decades of living a completely different lives than the next person.