None of the startrek.website folks have been in contact with me, and even they were I’d tell them to go pound sand—it’s great that VS & BT are finally experiencing some actual consequences for their poor conduct. Selfishly, I want a place where I can talk about Star Trek because I like Star Trek and those two keep ruining the places I want to hang out and talk about Star Trek in.

This has happened before, both on Reddit and Lemmy, but the problem with a bunch of loudmouths who make a splinter community is that you never know if those loudmouths have legitimate grievances or they’re just reactionary dipshits who want to bitch about wokeness. Every previous time this has happened, the reactionary dipshits flooded in and ruined the splinter community before it could get off the ground. Things got stuck in this reinforcing loop where the situation was “well /r/startrek (and later startrek.website) are run by petty tyrants but at least they keep the bigots in check.”

I was really hoping that I could steer startrek.website into being a fairer community than what came before, but there was just no receptiveness to feedback or open discussion over there whatsoever. I tried to warn them about how bad their reputation had become, but they didn’t want to hear it and I got iced out pretty much immediately. I had just about accepted that Lemmy would be a repeat of Reddit in this regard and the largest Star Trek community would suck. So, this is great. Seriously.

Along those lines, serious question: is /c/TenForward going to host episode discussion for Discovery season 5 and future Star Trek? I saw you mentioned that the Lemmy.World admins cleaned up lemmy.world/c/startrek, do you know the new mod over there? Any plans to coordinate with them?

To put a finer point on it: you successfully rescued /c/risa from startrek.website, can the team you’ve created here extend that success and rescue /c/startrek as well?

It’s common enough that /r/startrek developed a reputation for being unfairly draconian with their moderation which spread beyond Reddit. I knew they were really in trouble when I encountered comments about how bizarre and punitive their moderation style is in places like Twitter, Mastodon, and YouTube comments. Every once in a while I would see someone recommending Daystrom to someone who was banned from /r/startrek because the “mods aren’t as strict,” which is wild when you think about it: Daystrom has many pages of very specific rules and they are all actively enforced.

It’s pretty harsh and I’m biased because I’ve had some fun conversations about Star Trek with Value, but… no it’s probably not unfair. My interactions with them never reached this level of intensity because I just left, but the stubbornness has always been there.

Fuck it, lets kick this drama starship into transwarp. I am the creator of /r/DaystromInstitute, /r/Risa, I modded /r/startrek for about a year, and I helped to create startrek.website. AMAA.