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
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The comparisons to email are a good analogy. Your email is hosted on a service (e.g. @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) each has its own rules and setup. They also run independently. However, you can happily email someone at a different host. The hosts sort it out in the background. It's completely transparent.
With Lemmy, the instances are the equivalent of email hosts. You might use your work email service, or use a free one, or even pay to host your own. They will all play happily.
De-federation even has a good comparison. If an email server is sending masses of spam emails, the other hosts can decide to not accept emails from them. They get cut off. The decision is made on a host by host basis however. This contains power tripping to individual instances.
From a user's point of view, there are 2 main things to note. Local and All. Local only shows you posts on the instance you are logged into. This can be useful, of the instance is specialized, and you want to focus on that specialty, but not be limited to just 1 channel. This could be something like programming.dev, furries, or a NSFW instance.
All does what it says. It shows all posts on both the instance you are logged onto, and any your instance is federated with (basically everyone, other than those your admin has blocked).
As for which instance to choose? 3 main things matter, Focus, Ideology, and Stability. Focus is for if you have a specific interest. You are aren't limited to it, but a programmer basing themselves in a programming instance makes local channels more useful. Ditto for someone posting NSFW content.
Ideology is related, but slightly different. Different instances have different mentalities. E.g. Lemmy.world is the "default" while beehaw is more focused on providing a safe space over open access. Lemmygrad is full on tanky communist, and de-federated from Lemmy.world. Each has pros and cons, producing unique internal cultures.
Stability is likely the most important right now. Instances are run by individuals right now. This means they can only scale so far. One of federations goals is to spread the load. By using a smaller instance, you can gain a lot of stability, while losing little to nothing in access. Lemmy isn't one thing supreme, it is a legion under 1 banner.
Hope that helps.