Here’s what the sidebar says: “A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought-provoking questions.”
And yet we keep seeing is:
- Is it possible (or difficult) to migrate an entire forum from vanilla to a lemmy instance?
- Is Tom Clancy’s daughter trans, or is it a character of his?
- Does anyone have a link for ace attorney 1 full game playthrough?
- Does anyone have suggestions for buying a webcam?
TBC? Most posters do indeed bring it with highly thought-provoking Q’s, and I love that. But matey, there must be better places for these Q’s, yeah?
IMHO, the real problem is that the community is poorly-named. It should be “ThoughtfulDiscussion” or something. The name suggests a general forum to ask any question. And so, well, people do.
The /r/askreddit subreddit had the same problem as [email protected] does, as I recall.
EDIT: I’d add that I think that there’s actually a better argument for a general “ask questions” community on the Threadiverse than on Reddit, at least as things stand in 2025, because the userbase is smaller, so it’s hard to get many people in a lot of the niche forums. Like, sure, if you want to ask a question about Linux or about a video game, there are more-appropriate communities. But…suppose you want to ask a question about, say, fly-fishing? I haven’t looked, but I’ll bet that there isn’t even a fly-fishing community out there yet.
EDIT2: [email protected] is sorta-kinda for general posts that are intended to spark conversations, and the content there might be somewhat-closer to what you’re looking for, if you want content that people would actually talk about. I don’t know if I’d call all of that “thought-provoking”, but I think that stuff there is better at starting back-and-forth conversations, rather than just getting a one-off answer.
I see your point. I guess trying to copy “askreddit” came with its own unexpected baggage. We just don’t see the chaff on reddit because that sub is so established, has automod, etc (or at least the last time I visited regularly before the APIpocalypse)
I wasn’t a regular follower in recent years, so I’m reaching a bit further back, but yeah, I recall a steady flow of people submitting general questions and mods removing them. I’d have probably just treated it like a desire path ([email protected], BTW) — if that’s how people want to walk, maybe just a sign that it’s easier to just build a path there.
thinks
I suppose that there were some changes that could have happened in the move from Reddit.
There was also a collection of people who didn’t want to copy the “*porn” convention from Reddit for attractive-but-non-pornographic pictures of things (that one doesn’t bother me, but I do understand people who are uncomfortable about it and wanted to shelve it in the move). Like, their workplace may not care about people looking at landscape pictures, but gets twitchy about anything remotely porn-related.
There are also some pretty obscure jokes that came from long-ago Reddit drama or jokes that probably make the Threadiverse more-complicated to navigate for people who weren’t in on the joke from years back. Like the “inversion” communities, like trees/MarijuanaEnthusiasists ([email protected] and [email protected]) or worldnews/anime_titties ([email protected] and [email protected], though it looks like eventually, worldnews went back to being actual world news both on Reddit and here). Or /r/superbowl ([email protected]), though I think that that one, at least, someone can figure out if they stumble into it. Might have been a good argument that we should have adopted more-conventional naming. But I think that the bigger concern in the big move was getting things up-and-running, rather than trying to rearchitect everything.