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?
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People ask those questions here because it’s not obvious where else they should ask those questions.
In my opinion, Lemmy doesn’t have enough traffic to be hostile to lost
RedditorsLemmings.We can always redirect people to appropriate communities (assuming they exist and are active), and once we hit a certain critical mass the problem will go away on its own.
For people asking about alternative communities, we put together a list a while back when closing
!askmen@lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/48642221“Ask” communities (for starting a discussion):
For questions that are more specific to your situation:
Group specific communities:
Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):
I’d like to add [email protected] to that list. it’s more neutrally gendered and that’s a good thing IMO.
Looks good, I’ve added it to this post and the two pinned ones
more neutrally gendered and that’s a good thing IMO.
Why?
Because being inclusive is better than exclusive, especially considering the typical sizes of these communities.
Because being inclusive is better than exclusive
Why?
Because being good is good.
Except wrt you. Ew, gross.Why is inclusivity good? Are you saying we should, then, create /c/PeoplesStuff to replace /WomensStuff ?
Eww, why are you still taking?
These are great, thanks!!
This question is neither open ended or thought provoking. QED
I’m just happy people are using the community. Its way too quiet most days for lots of hard set rules.
Lol, this post breaches the rules. It is not thought provoking. There are no rules about meta posts being exempt.
If you don’t like posts as you think they are not good for the community, downvore and move on. Or direct people to a more correct community to post.
Helpful and constructive discussion is more important than rote following rules with such a small community.
Hyper moderation can work well for something like r/ask historians but is overkill for general discussion. Better discussion should drown out the chaff.
Yeah, so what? This is the natural evolution of online communities. It’s a good thing. When the user base is small, we should have a few, non-specific channels/forums/communities/whatevers so that everybody is in the same place to talk to each other. Metaphorically, it’s like sustaining a nuclear reaction: The fissile material has to be in close enough proximity so that the radiation (posts and comments) can strike more fissile material (other users) to keep the chain reaction going. In the past, I’ve criticized the urge to immediately atomize Lemmy into thousands of highly-specific communities, and indeed, most of them have withered away.
Once a particular topic starts to dominate a community, once it’s reached critical mass, then it’s time to fork it off into its own community. I don’t think that’s happened to [email protected] yet.
Well, somebody thought it was smart to block a very generic name like “AskLemmy” and make it a crazy fringe group out of it instead of one fitting the name. Yes, people could read the sidebar, but with a name that suggestive while having a completely counterintuitive use - nothing else should be expected.
[email protected] is a good alternative.
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.
IMO I believe these types of communities, although entertaining and enlightening, are index farms used by governments to identify users and fingerprint them to their real life identities.
I see far too many generalized questions like, “what is your favorite color” “when you were a kid what was the most famous musician” “where were you the day the towers fell” “what’s your favorite brand of cheese” etc…
just sayin, if it’s not happening now, it will be one day.
What’s your mother’s maiden name? What’s the street you grew up on? First pet?
I’m gonna be real, I actually don’t see anything against any of these questions in the sidebar except your first question about technical matters.
Cool!
In which case, how should we organise such things across the FV…?Chill out about them I guess.
I’m not sure what the answer is. I understand not wanting to scare people off, but what’s the point of building a lemmy community if ends up being built on low effort posts? I’m not sure what we have to lose by following the rules. Growth may be slower but I think it would make for a more interesting community.
