That doesn’t apply to Linux communities on Lemmy though, but I meet a lot of Linux communities, that are toxic and beginner-unfriendly. People, who have voluntarily decided to maintain a community, behave like I broke into their house at 3 AM with my questions. If I ask a question, there will be a 20% chance to get any relevant response, but a 100% chance of being nagged with some bullshit. It especially applies to the behaviour of mods. For instance, a dude was messing with me because I have searched for a binary on the official internet database, instead of quering it via package manager.
I wish I could just avoid junkyards like that, but I can’t: I haven’t found another active community for Void Linux.
As far as I can tell from my experience, it is something specific to Linux or IT communities.
So why is it like this?
In the Linux community, it’s mostly the people who are developing the software who are also supporting the forums. To them, the forums are a way of communicating with others who are also working on improving the software. So at the end of the day, to them the forums are doing their job when people are contributing new content and ideas and making their lives easier.
Unfortunately, people new to the forums are going to be there to get assistance, asking questions about the stuff these people documented specifically so nobody would have to take them away from creating neat new things to hand hold them through using the older things. And most of these people aren’t technical writers or even communicators.
If you were somehow in a forum with a bunch of Windows, Android or macOS developers, you’d probably find the same level of toxic before long.
Because it’s not about you. It’s that you’re following the same learning curve of hundreds of others before you, and it causes these people to have to repeatedly stop what brings them joy to explain the same thing to yet another person. Or, you’ve got a new question. THAT means that nobody likely has the answer, and somebody needs to figure it out and then document it and then point you at the documentation, instead of doing what they want to be doing in their limited free time.
The Linux communities that aren’t like this tend to be small, or have a large education contingent, or are privately funded and so have professional communicators managing the forums.