Hi! I’ve looked through /r/shittyaskscience and I think it leans too far into jokes with very little actual science content. The idea behind mander is to support specific, niche science-related communities, so a general joke-focused community doesn’t really fit.

For ‘science_memes’, the mod is a very capable superstar and I agree with their vision of memes as a laid-back way to connect people to science. It’s plausible that a community like ‘shittyaskscience’ could achieve something similar, but honestly I think science_memes already covers that space well.

As for !askscience - it simply hasn’t been created yet. It would be more fitting than ‘shittyaskscience’, but I still prefer encouraging people to ask lichen questions in the lichen community, mushroom questions in the mushroom community, chemistry questions in the chemistry community, and so on. I support content flowing toward niche communities rather than having a centralized place for general questions. A general community would be more popular, but popularity isn’t a goal, and it works against the underlying philosophy. Niche spaces may be smaller, but they offer much better signal-to-noise for building meaningful connections.

Sure, lemmy.zip seems good.

!shittyaskscience@lemmy.zip