I was just thinking about this, when I’m facing an issue, the first thing I do is go to a search engine and usually there’s a Reddit post. But I don’t want to ask there. And the only way we’re going to build up the info for folks to find us and come here is for us to just start asking here. On the Fediverse. We need to build up that mountain of knowledge that Reddit has and will always have. So we should be championing ANYONE asking questions here. Even if we think it’s obvious and we think you can just Google it. There was a time where you literally couldn’t just Google it. That was built over time. We need to build that here. So start asking your questions here! Find the answers and then post your answer to your own question. Or let someone do it for you. We need to build the knowledge here to be found. It’s not just about people looking for alternatives. We need our knowledge to be more valuable than their knowledge.
Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.
Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.
I remember a social media platform where each user had a thread specific ID “curious rabbit/astonished baboon”, and users can discuss anything without any fear. The moment you created a new thread or participate in a new thread, your ID changed. I think it fizzled out eventually, but the concept was interesting.