You're not going to find a sympathetic ear from the mods of this community (believe me I've tried, oh have I tried) but I understand where you're coming from and agree. The Lemmy network in general is comprised of a lot of people who are here (I'm sorry to say) because they are too poorly socialized even for reddit, and there are too few mods/admins in the overall network are who know what it means to be the adult in the room. The result is that most places with authentic activity are too toxic for "normies" and the places willing to enforce something as simple as good manners are quieter.

I still believe a critical mass of more ah, well-adjusted people can improve the culture, but that day gets further and further away as long as the existing culture remains in the state it is in.

Maybe we didn't achieve our goals in the way we set out to do, but we made a lot of friends (decals) along the way.

For future reference:

I never got much into the comics, anyone with experience know if these are a good place to start?

(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)

I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.

The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.

With startrek.website we'd hoped creating a Star Trek themed instance might encourage other ex-moderators to start topic-specific instances too, and it would kick off a flourishing of myriad communities run by devoted moderators, a Lemmyverse so diverse and inspiring that not even Reddit could further justify it's own existence in the presence of such an obviously superior system.

Instead it turned out "Star Trek and Linux" was enough to satisfy nearly everyone's tastes (both subtle and gross).

The best cold intro is:

"Counselor Deanna Troi, personal log, stardate 44805.3. My mother is on board."

Empty corridor with Picard peeking around the corner

My gut says that this is probably not appeasement but a subtle rebellious act. They could have edited the article or geoblocked it just in India, but instead they removed it altogether, adding to the story and ultimatley bringing even more attention to it.

While I don't think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.

It's up (and fast) for me rn. They have been getting DDOS'd in a way specifically targeted for sites running Lemmy. Lemmy is still beta software so hopefully this can be a growing experience for the greater Fediverse. The .world admins are some of the most capable out there.