EDIT 3: **Due to some bugs we’re delaying this feature until Lemmy 0.19.6 is released! **
The goal of c/Quarks has always been to help foster a sense of community for StarTrek.website, but it is just a generic “offtopic” community and does not really have an identity of it’s own on the Fediverse.
Thanks to the new feature in Lemmy 19.4, we can create true “local only” communities. And Quark’s can be what it was originally intended to be, a place for our users. This will allow us to better discuss what kind of experience users of this instance wish to have (not just provide) without all the dorks on less cool instances coming here and ruining our weather control network.
EDIT: to those of you concerned about missing out on “trek-adjacent discussion” @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website has indicated they plan on loosening the “on topic” rule of /c/StarTrek to include more of that.
EDIT2: If anyone is interested in growing and operating a community on our instance, please feel free to reach out or comment here!
That’s a total bummer but I’m not moving my whole identity for one single community. If everyone did this, Fedi would be an ever lonelier place.
Bye 👋
I’m legitimately curious: what is the appeal of this community to a remote user?
@ValueSubtracted @deegeese you’re joking, right?
I only discovered this place after I was on fedi for 3+ years. It’s incredible and amazing to be able to participate remotely. I honestly can’t fathom why you WOULDN’T want that. But hey if they want to close it then bye I guess.
From what I can see, you’ve only participated in this community once, nine months ago.
The other communities (StarTrek, Daystrom, Risa, etc.) are all staying open and federated.
@ValueSubtracted oh I didn’t realize there were requirements for “participation” my bad
It was just a point of clarification in case you misunderstood.
@ValueSubtracted oh I completely understand now that liking, boosting, or privately enjoying posts is not an acceptable level of engagement in an online community where “participation” is required. Thanks 🖖💫
@starkraving666
@ValueSubtracted
Never trust an instance with a closed governance process
Goofy decision. I have an account here, but I rarely use it because of the ratio of spam to genuine posts on the instance.
You could always just defederate from those toxic instances? It seems like this isn’t a popular decision with the community. Might be worth rethinking it.
The admin team doesn’t make instance decisions based on what’s “popular”. It’s actually against our mission statement. Though that doesn’t mean community input is ignored.
But that being said, admins can see who’s voting and we can see that the downvotes are not coming from users with much/any history in this community. So we are not taking their feedback strongly into account.
This logic is bonkers. Lurkers are part of the community too. Everyone participates in their own way.
Man, I don’t like Stamets but he was right lol.
When you guys just wanna do something even if people disagree you’re gonna do it.
On either side though it kind of sucks. From the mods are right perspective, yeah, basically only users from the instance post here already. On the other side though, bringing activity in from across the federation is definitely a better move long-term unless the people coming in are toxic. Latest non @stw poster had a hilarious premise and I loved it. Would hate to see that go, but I guess it’s going to /c/startrek anyways.
Everybody is kinda dug in here, it’s pretty sad.
The problem is nobody wants to grow and maintain a federated “Trek adjacent” community. I’ve even offered the opportunity to host one on this instance and nobody wants to put in the effort.
(Also, I just need to point out that Stamets was not “right” about anything involving our team. He claimed the Risa mods were “transphobic”, and set up a new community where he repeated the claims. When one of our Admins asked Stamets if he intended to continue, he cried harassment and used the attention to promote a GoFundMe.)
I think you guys actually need more open communities and not less.
Quark’s is great as an off-topic zone. The theme makes sense because the bar is somewhere people go to unwind and not necessarily talk direct shop. Stuff like news that’s Trek-adjacent fits perfectly in here, but the subsequent topics listed after other sci-fi television kind of deserve their own community. I think the scope of Quark’s is too large.
Navigating the fediverse and server meta have traditionally been their own communities as a /c/meta sort of affair. Those are definitely things that only the @stw community would really want to discuss internally and perhaps should be kept instance-user-only, but something like news and other “adjacent” content is of value across the federation and the opportunity for everyone to post just makes more organic sense to me. I would also take the opportunity to have another themed name, like /c/battlebridge, /c/ops or even /c/conferenceroom for the meta community.
Yeah I totally agree with pretty much everything you just said.
