Anyone interested in a skeptic community?
Anyone interested in a skeptic community?
Hello, I'm a Reddit refugee and I was a prolific poster on r/skeptic. I would love a Lemmy skeptics community, but I haven't found an active one anywhere. Mander seems like a good place for one. If I started one, would people be interested?
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What's the elevator pitch for it?
I'm not sure what more is needed for an elevator pitch, but I'll try- A community for skeptics to gather and share information, news, have discussion, etc. Typical for Lemmy from what I've seen so far. I just want an alternative to r/skeptic.
I have never had any exposure to r/skeptic so that's probably why I'm lost. But being a skeptic is more a state of mind for me. This being a science instance, I assumed was everywhere. Like people wouldn't take things at face value without scientific publication backing statements and such. I don't know what a specific community for skepticism would add in this environment.
Like, what would a post be like? Reference another post or a news article and deconstruct it with references to academic publications?
I don't know that academic publications are necessary, there are plenty of things posted here which aren't from journals. But I was thinking articles like the one I posted in Science Communication. It's not quite right for that community, but I still think the Mander instance as a whole would enjoy seeing articles like that.
I have previously asked the community about how they feel about the scope of Mander, and I see that the communitie's views are mostly aligned with what I want on this.
I want to keep a focus of the instance on discussing specific science and nature topics. I have seen several posts made to "Science" and "Science Communication" that touch on issues that are in a sense related to science but not really a direct scientific or nature-related topic. These are posts often concerned with social topics like the spread of "fake news" or the media mis-representing things.
These are not within the scope, and they are better suited for communities in other instances.
I have not taken many actions yet because I need to work more on the policy, but I can tell you that I'm not really so much in favor of building communities centered around non-specific popular topics that have a high probability of triggering polarizing discussions that are not even focusing on science. Even if most people like to discuss these, myself included, it's simply not the concept of Mander. Being so popular and engaging, consider that those posts would easily be able to dominate the "Local" view and hide the actual science-centered niche discussions.