why does avoiding political discussion have to be the metric for "genuine conversation"? seems a bit biased and smallminded.
Pay no attention to the elephant in the room
Post, comment, upvote non-political stuff. It signals "I want to see more of this".
Downvote political off-topic. Talking about Mao Zedong in a thread about cat pictures is no-good, just like talking about cats in a thread about Maoism*.
Note that I'm being fairly specific on the suggestion to downvote political off-topic. Politics can - and should - be discussed; but there's a time and a place for everything.
*Unless you're talking about 貓泽东, then both are on-topic. [/shitty joke]
Think of the Fediverse as Earth and the instances as countries. Countries have constitutions that establish the values of the country. Instances are the same.
Suppose we have NoStudpidQuestions on Instance1 and Instance2. Instance1 is like the USA, and Instance2 is like Canada. Instance1 will be more lenient on free speech than Instance2, which is more prone to civility (this is just an exaggeration).
This is the beauty of Fediverse. You choose the communities and instances you want to follow. You are free.
Realistically, I think no.
While it would be nice, all it takes is one person making a comment that someone else declares is "political" to devolve a place into tit-for-tat political vitriol. And this extends into social politics as well. Unfortunately, so many people now have made their personal politics their identity, and look for opportunities to fight, argue, and moral grandstand. Pick literally any conversation about anything, and there are people that will determine the "red choice" or the "blue choice," and will scream and yell the choice they think identifies with their color politics without forming an actual opinion themselves.
Maybe 20 years ago this would have been possible. But its not possible anymore.
I think it's up to the mods/admins to cultivate such a culture/community. If you restrict low-quality political posts, the people who that's their life will go elsewhere. I know that's what I'm going for on my instance. I'd rather have fewer people who actually talk about interesting things than constant bad posts.
I'm with you on this ... somewhat. I'm tired of everything being political everywhere. I hate how every discussion goes down with politics. One way to "achieve" this would be if you or someone like you made a lemmy instance where nothing political would be allowed and we were to browse that locally. I myself hate both left wing and right wing equally so I'd love a place where I'm free of politics.
The other way is much simpler, which is you browse through communities and find what's political and what's not and subscribe to them and only browse through your subscriptions.
However it's neither possible nor justified to not allow people to get political. 99% of the internet is made of politics and sex
!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:
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.
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Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
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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.
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That's it.
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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.
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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.
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If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
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Let everyone have their own content.
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