Defederation is the nuclear option. Until now we had removed any communities we weren't comfortable hosting, and treated users on a case-by-case basis based on how they behaved in our communities, which worked for a while but became untenable.
When we started this project the admin team felt that welcoming outsiders into our (wholesome, sane) Star Trek communities was the net-positive action. But as I said it became too much to handle so we unfortunately had to cut the cord.
I think Beehaw.org is. We're 2/3 as well (now). .ml has some communities/users we've removed, but largely speaking .ml users have not caused any issues on our hosted communities, and we feel exposing them to our (generally awesome) communities is the net-positive here. Honestly .world's (lack of) moderation is more actively an issue for our mods, but since they're so big and we're a niche instance we really can't afford to de-federate from them.
Bookstack is great!
You are correct that it is a requirement for all communities hosted on this instance to be actively moderated within instance principles.
I'm not against hosting a comics community, but it's also not like /c/StarTrek is overflowing with OC and I'm sure the mods would be happy to have comics content (and you happier with their 10k users).
Yeah I totally agree with pretty much everything you just said.
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.)
Per instance guidelines, submitting on-topic content to relevant communities is not considered spam. But if you want to stay subscribed to /c/STO and block ValueSubtracted's "spam" StarTrek.website has a block feature you can find on their userpage.
@ptz@dubvee.org Tagging you here because you're basically the only other person who contributes to this community.
I hear you, but "drawing folks into the fandom tent" was not what Quark's (or the instance for that matter) was created for. Quark's has always been "General off-topic chat for the crew of startrek.website.".
That said, if you or anyone else wanted to create a community with that or a related stated purpose (and promised to grow and actively maintain it in line with instance values) I would be more than happy to entertain the idea. But you can't have mine lol
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!
Like many other Lemmy instances, we turned one this week! If you enjoy the Voyager app experience but prefer to only login locally (not that there's any reason whatsoever to distrust vger.app) or not log in at all, we now have an option for you!
https://vger.startrek.website/
(actual footage of a vger.startrek.website user)
A friendly reminder that we also have mlem ("old reddit") fronted installed too for those that prefer browsing in a familiar interface on desktop.
We do plan on updating to Lemmy 0.19.4 sometime this month so keep an eye out for that!
If you've noticed the site hitching lately it's because we were reaching our storage limit (again, oops) so we purchased significantly more storage that appears to be helping.
Big nuqneH to our Patreon supporters for keeping our little corner of the Fediverse on the air a whole year and also allowing us to add features like these frontends and wiki (editing is open to all!) If you'd like to pitch in we have just one plan and it's only $4.
You may need to clear cache/cookies for the login bug to fix itself but a "hard" refresh might do the trick too.
Also our hosting provider (and so by extension us) has been certified by the green web foundation. Neat!
We had been waiting at 0.18.5 for a while because 0.19 came with some federation bugs (and obviously it would be extremely embarrassing if this instance had issues in that department).
The biggest changes for users are a new scaled sorting method that should prioritize posts from smaller communities (no more Risa dominating the entire feed), the ability for users to block whole instances, and the ability to import/export accounts with other instances (or just back up your account).
Also I'd like to apologize for the downtime; we expected this to be a simple update taking only a few minutes, so I didn't post an alert in advance, but then were some issues that caused us to go offline for several hours.
Lastly, after the update I found I had to clear my browser cache/cookies in order to log in, similarly, users using apps have been reporting they needed to remove and re-add their accounts. You may find you need to do that too!
EDIT: The app Liftoff has a bug preventing login on any Lemmy instance over v0.19.0
EDIT 2: We've updated to 0.19.3, mostly just bugfixes in this one.
Tesseract is great!