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 !asklemmy@lemmy.world 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: !casualconversation@piefed.social 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.