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?
I think most newbies would rather find the answer themselves in the wiki or old forum threads, but that’s often difficult if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for.
Running with your example, let’s say I’m trying to find out the color of the sky but don’t know it’s called sky. And to make it worse, right now it’s covered by some kind of gray mass… Is that perhaps The Cloud I’ve heard people talking about? I would Google something like “huge thing above color” but unsurprisingly I wouldn’t end up on your wiki. So I end up asking the question on the forums instead.
I used to work in IT support, where 95% of the questions were about things that were already comprehensively documented if people would just read. Instead of yelling at customers for asking dumb questions, we had response templates we could send with just a single click.
I don’t understand why communities overwhelmed by repeat questions don’t do something similar. The next time someone asks about the sky color, it would take just one click to reply politely with a link to that wiki article and everyone would be happy.