No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Votes are semi-public. Not every instance makes them public, but anyone who is on an instance that does can see them.
Your comments and posts are public, I think your subscriptions as well, so if you need to protect yourself from harassment the remedy is just like reddit: have accounts that don't overlap, one for politics, one for anime, one for whatever.
You should definitely only create a community on an instance where it fits. For example, a muni about fashion doesn't belong on the the solarpunk instance, and a muni about ocean life doesn't belong on midwest.social. Many instances are "general" instances, though.
Moderation here lacks the robust toolset of reddit, so it's hard to compare them. But you can have posts and comment threads removed (lemmy removes whole threads, not just the parent comment); you can be banned from a muni or even a whole instance; but no one can ban you from all of lemmy. Unlike reddit, your home instance can be defederated, which is basically shadowbanning your entire server. Defederations and mod actions are public; other admin actions can be done stealthily by directly editing the database.
You don't need an active "home" instance if you have a robust subscription list, honestly, because you can subscribe to munis on other instances.
Thanks. Is lemmy.world the best instance for general discussion?
Best is very subjective.
.world is a good general purpose instance for just about anything. I think it has the biggest population at the moment, so communities there are likely to get at least some engagement.
For "general discussion" it doesn't really matter. The instances are federated so you'll likely get general discussion in comments from lots of people from lots of instances anyway, wherever your community is based.
Some people get almost nationalistic about their chosen instances or have grudges against people from certain other instances. There's sometimes inter-instance politics with some servers defederating with others or threatening to for various reasons. It's kinda fun to watch in a popcorn drama kind of way. For the most part, the instance doesn't matter.