I want to try asking more questions online since it has become so difficult to find things with search engines.

But I don’t really know where to post my questions?
How do you decide what community to post to?

For example:
I have a question about meditation.
This looks pretty straightforward, I search for ‘meditation’ under all communities.
I find 2 communities called Meditation. (I can find more if I search on another lemmy instance, but they don’t seem to show up on my current instance)
Both of them look rather inactive.

Do I just post to both of them? Is it possible to post to multiple communities simultaneously?
Should I look for other communities, what to search for?

  • CobblerScholar@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    Starting on NoStupidQuestions is a good place to start. Usually get a few general answers and recommendation to the proper community

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    Ideally you’ve been lurking a while and have an idea of what the comms are called. Or, you come from Reddit and you know most of them are the same (e.g. Ask Reddit → Ask Lemmy).

    Then you have a choice between a comm on an instance that is friendly toward yours (i.e. is not likely to defederate you/yours in the future) or one that is more popular. I generally like to post on dbzer0, quokk, hexbear, sh.itjustworks, and similar when I can. But Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.zip, and a few others get more traffic, so I might post to one of those if I want to get replies. But even if you’re on a smaller instance and you post to bigger instances to get traffic, I think you should post on your own instance, at least cross post it, or contribute to your own instance in other ways.

    So, in short: your instance to support it, the bigger instance to get visibility. For something like Meditation, maybe a broad comm like AskLemmy, and a more focused one like Buddhism (or whatever).

    • AloneDownUnder@quokk.auOP
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      4 hours ago

      Thank you, that’s helpful.

      I’m very bad at remembering all the communities though.
      Even though I used reddit before and knew AskReddit, I didn’t think about AskLemmy at all.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    Ideally you’ve been lurking a while and have an idea of what the comms are called. Or, you come from Reddit and you know most of them are the same (e.g. Ask Reddit → Ask Lemmy).

    Then you have a choice between a comm on an instance that is friendly toward yours (i.e. is not likely to defederate you/yours in the future) or one that is more popular. I generally like to post on dbzer0, quokk, hexbear, sh.itjustworks, and similar when I can. But Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.zip, and a few others get more traffic, so I might post to one of those if I want to get replies. But even if you’re on a smaller instance and you post to bigger instances to get traffic, I think you should post on your own instance, at least cross post it, or contribute to your own instance in other ways.

    So, in short: your instance to support it, the bigger instance to get visibility. For something like Meditation, maybe a broad comm like AskLemmy, and a more focused one like Buddhism (or whatever).

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      2 hours ago

      It looks like the Flotilla that is allying itself hard with the Triad is also becoming problematic. e.g. it seems to either be initiating walling itself off from other instances or at least strongly okay to have that happen to it, playing up the “victim” angle heavily (despite every shot having been fired so far being initiated by them, afaict).

      I wonder what term this will eventually be called - like maybe Triad+? :-P Regardless, it’s so sad to see hexbear leaking, that is always the problem with the Paradox of Intolerance. 😓🙃

      The Threadiverse seems poised to split into two factions based on whether people are pro-murder enough for others’ tastes. e.g. if you think that luigi should be a noun rather than a verb then they don’t want you to continue to exist, either irl or here on the Threadiverse.

      The Left, like Veganism, always eats its own, thereby often causing the Right (in this case Reddit, Xhitter, and Meta/Facebook) to win, since utopia is only a place that can exist in theory (it requires too much work to implement in practice, which people are typically not willing to put forth).

  • theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 hours ago

    Search for relevant communities.

    Look at what instance they are hosted on.

    Choose the one that isn’t hosted on Lemmy.world

    Post there to try and help foster engagement in communities away from .world

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    I usually post on the one with more people. Then, without any answer, I’d crosspost.

    Crossposting is something I try to avoid as it creates another post. It would be nice if crossposting allowed people from both instance to see and answer in the same message.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    7 hours ago

    I think you just got to pick a relevant ish community and fucking send it. A lot of the stuff is news posts so it can feel out of place but at the end of the day I think we all prefer discussion threads with humans asking and answering each others questions.