What would be a good server to start on?
I'm just a bit confused.
E:
Started by observing, and i have not a single fucking idea what's going on.
Firstly I should make you aware that I'm a pretty long standing member/admin of BS12. As a result my suggestions may be slightly biased! Hooray.
The options, not counting various offsprings (Apollo Station, Minerva Station, LLA, D2k5 (?)) are as follows.
The Something Awful servers. Known also as Goonstation, because members of SA are Goons, or as Gibbed, because that's what the servers are actually called. You can play here if you want chaos. But not just chaos, a specific brand of chaos that often involves doing horrible things to other people. There's very little RP here. You might find some if you initiate it and the other player is down for that, but it's far more likely that half way through initiating it you'll get murdered, then cloned, then murdered again. Actually, it occurs to me that the distinctions with which people measure the servers are pretty wrong. Let's go with this scale for now. Goon, at the far left side, are focused on mechanics. If you go to goon you can probably find about a million chemical recipes, bombs, traps, things to discover. Generally things to do , in space. You could, for example, find the recipe for LSD. Then you could turn that LSD into a smoke bomb. That's pretty cool, but then you could put that into a pipe bomb, which you could then give to some random assistant, and then he'll proceed to get high as fuck. Hooray.
Then you have /tg/. Obviously the server for 4chan's traditional games outlet, you'd imagine this to be far more focused on the roleplay. It's fair to say it -is- far more focused on roleplay than Goon, but only because Goon isn't at all. You can come here if you want pretty chaotic fun, with a baseline in light RP. Nothing deep, or super serious, but when there's a blob attacking the station and you've teamed up with the wizard and some friendly aliens to take it down, you'll at least be roleplaying it as it "would be". Which probably means lots of shouting, panic and general death everywhere. This is fun, though, honest. /tg/ may also be the most approachable in terms of community. While goon is pretty decent because they get the most "new people" (or at least, did), I've found /tg/ to be pretty accepting of all people. While goon may ban you for using anime smilies in OOC, /tg/ won't. Probably.
Finally, you have BS12 and I promise this won't be just me trying to get you to come over here. At BS12, you can do the roleplays. You can do the fun roleplays, you can do the serious roleplays. You can do the roleplays where you're a janitor who instead of cleaning actually just steals everything. You can also do the roleplays where you're just a guy who works in space. The only roleplays you explicitly CANNOT do are the erotic and the insane roleplays. This might sound like bullshit to you, because hey why would there be that much freedom when all you've heard is bad things? Well...some of those bad things may have been true in the past. The nature of the internet is that the past is never forgotten. People will remember how things used to be and take judgments from that. We used to be pretty damn strict. I didn't like it. As a fan the of the chaos that is inherent to both /tg/ and Goon, I couldn't get into BS12, even though I was an admin. Having played recently I can honestly say that it's way better now. While there is space for the serious roleplay, and most of our players prefer that, there's still space for the crazy situations that ARE SS13. The overall guideline for BS12 is "If you're not sure that this is allowed, ASK". We have not only a fairly decent admin team, but also a fuckton of moderators who can answer your questions. (any question. even the creepy one).
So yeah. Not sure how good a job I did there, but hey. The main rule with SS13 servers is finding what style you like and then finding a server that suits it. In this case I'd suggest observing a round or 3 on each of the servers (if you have time...maybe just one on BS12), and seeing which you find funner to watch. Then you can make the jump.
Also as a piece of BS12 adminnery: We kinda have a reputation for not being very kind to newcomers. This isn't a true thing. If you come on the server and say "Hey guys I'm new" or whatever, there will be people LITERALLY EVERYWHERE that want to help you. So go for it. If you want.
edit: re : admins being shitty. Not really. A few of us have the whole "I'm going to be a dick" facade. Most of those ones don't go on the server ever at all though.