this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
95 points (94.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

49712 readers
573 users here now

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. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 18 points 4 days ago

Honestly?

Get some real historians.

Without people that are actually in the field, with stringent standards to go along with that, you'll only get casual and unreliable answers. Which means that nobody wanting a good answer with depth and historiography is going to waste their time. Most of the time, responses there aren't half as informative as Pugjesus' memes.

R/askhistorians worked because it was run by experts and expert level responses were the only kind allowed. You knew going in that you might not get an answer at all, but if you did it was going to be relevant and be good enough to use as a source for a paper.

Nothing on the fediverse has that level of effort put into it.

Also, being real here, the moderation team having zero background in history research means that it's incredibly unlikely to ever draw real historians to ask questions of. Why would they?

Could you hypothetically make it happen? Sure. I guess. If you reach out to some of the people that were generalists back on reddit, charm them into the idea of a more open forum, help them onboard, and make certain your mod team is both vigorous and rigorous, you might, might get a couple. I doubt it, since the ones that fled reddit already said that the lack of robust mod tools made them unwilling to start up here. But if you're serious enough about it, maybe it could work.

Again, being real, while I appreciate your presence and activity, Don, you gotta realize that the percentage of historians that would consider it are very likely to see you as the mod and nope the fuck out. I hate dumping on you because I genuinely love the effort you put in to asking things nobody would otherwise bring up. But that same user history is offputting if someone were looking at it as an indicator of how serious a community will be run. I'm sorry to say it though, I really do appreciate you.