The question at this point is when do we pivot away to an alternative where these topics aren't covered up? Maybe even hosted in Europe.

Tildes has replaced HN and Reddit as the site I default to for news aggregation.

I do feel like it is a bit light on the technology/programming front, otherwise it has a well-rounded mix of interesting topics. I feel like its decisions to not have a downvote button, as well as only allowing sign-ups through limited invites from other existing users, were smart ones.

Mastodon is also good, depending on how well you curate.

Lemmy uses the same underlying protocol but is closer to hn in form

There's https://frontpage.fyi/, which is built on ATProto (same as Bluesky). Doesn't seem to have a whole lot of activity yet, though.