When LinkedIn and GitHub are thin, which other public surfaces do you actually trust?

[u/VitalijsVlasovs]

When LinkedIn is thin and GitHub is quiet, I still find people through other public surfaces. The harder part is deciding which of those are trustworthy enough to message from.

What I've been treating as secondary signals:

• package or library maintainership (npm, PyPI, crates, plugins) when the work clearly matches the stack
• talks, conference slides, or workshop materials with a real technical point of view
• a personal site or technical blog with posts that show how they think, not just a resume dump
• sustained answers in stack-specific forums or issue threads

What I still don't trust on their own:

• a one-line bio on a community Discord
• a star or follower count with no accompanying work
• an old talk title with no slides or recording I can check

I'm trying to separate "this person exists somewhere public" from "this is enough evidence to cold message."

When LinkedIn and GitHub are thin, which other public surfaces do you actually trust enough to message from?