Honestly?

Get some real historians.

Without people that are actually in the field, with stringent standards to go along with that, you’ll only get casual and unreliable answers. Which means that nobody wanting a good answer with depth and historiography is going to waste their time. Most of the time, responses there aren’t half as informative as Pugjesus’ memes.

R/askhistorians worked because it was run by experts and expert level responses were the only kind allowed. You knew going in that you might not get an answer at all, but if you did it was going to be relevant and be good enough to use as a source for a paper.

Nothing on the fediverse has that level of effort put into it.

Also, being real here, the moderation team having zero background in history research means that it’s incredibly unlikely to ever draw real historians to ask questions of. Why would they?

Could you hypothetically make it happen? Sure. I guess. If you reach out to some of the people that were generalists back on reddit, charm them into the idea of a more open forum, help them onboard, and make certain your mod team is both vigorous and rigorous, you might, might get a couple. I doubt it, since the ones that fled reddit already said that the lack of robust mod tools made them unwilling to start up here. But if you’re serious enough about it, maybe it could work.

Again, being real, while I appreciate your presence and activity, Don, you gotta realize that the percentage of historians that would consider it are very likely to see you as the mod and nope the fuck out. I hate dumping on you because I genuinely love the effort you put in to asking things nobody would otherwise bring up. But that same user history is offputting if someone were looking at it as an indicator of how serious a community will be run. I’m sorry to say it though, I really do appreciate you.