You just reminded me that a few years ago I was doing some product research and one of the questions I'd ask people was what technical communities they turned to regularly. To keep up with news, if they had a question to ask they needed an answer to (this was pre-LLM hype days). HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and various Slack communities dominated the results for people I spoke to in the USA. I was shocked by how much private WhatsApp groups dominated amongst the respondents from Africa (Nigeria representing the overwhelming majority of people who I spoke to).

At the time it felt to me they were missing out on so many other useful resources. Maybe I was wrong. It's interesting to see things trending in a similar direction now.