Every single large server in this federation has at least one Star Trek community. There is even an entire server dedicated to Star Trek.
Not only that, these communities are some of the most active I’ve ever seen. There is no other franchise I know of that dominates the federation as much as Star Trek does.
So, what’s the correlation with Lemmy and Star Trek? Why not other sci-fi series? Please, are there any connections?? Is this all coincidental?
The Star Trek community has been going strong for nearly 60 years for a reason - Star Trek rocks.
When it started in the 60s (and continued especially strong with TNG in the 80s), it was unique in depicting a hopeful look at how things could be rather than a reflection of how things are, differing from how most shows do social commentary. It’s refreshing.
Star Trek is attractive to people who want to see a world where people work together toward great things in a post-scarcity utopia, with current day conversations of race, nationality, sex, gender, etc. being so far in the rear-view mirror that they’re non-issues. Plus cool technology. I think that appeals to the Lemmy crowd.
Another key point I feel is often overlooked about Star Trek is the “Gulliver’s Travels” component of (at least pre-Kelvin) Star Trek. Every show, every race was secretly a fun-house-like caricature of humanity’s worst traits, with the humans of the show demonstrating growth past that point. You laugh at or shirk away from them, but really it’s modern humanity that is being depicted (Ferengi as capitalists, Klingons as warmongers, Romulans as subversives, etc.) And then we see what we could be, the hope that you talked about, in future humanity
It seems like such a creative way to do social commentary. We get to see our present failings in aliens, and then contrast it with how the crew (future humanity) carries themselves. Sometimes it’s very clunky and heavy handed (like that TOS episode with the half-white/half-black aliens), but it’s still good. My favorites are every time Picard monologues about their values to an alien race in TNG.
Even if you already share the values, it’s fascinating to hear them laid out so clearly.
It helps that Stewart is such a fantastic monologist. It’s like hearing something complex about biology or ecology from David Attenborough. They both have such an effortless ability to communicate difficult subjects.
The original series is very 1960s and I wouldn’t recommend for a jumping in point. I’d go with next Gen for that, it’s the quintessential trek more so than the original having had 3 spinoffs in the 90s and defining most of the canon. Here’s the issue though, the first 2 seasons of tng really suck. Like maybe the worst 2 seasons of the whole franchise. I’d check out some best of lists for those seasons and maybe sprinkle a couple random ones in, they did 26 hour long episodes per season and there are some amazing clunkers there, bad episodes are part of trek and you’ve gotta learn to enjoy them, but those first 2 seasons are rough.
So others have already talked about how great Star Trek is. I agree with them, but I think that literally everyone has missed the point of your question:
It's its own lemmy instance. It was spawned from the migration away from reddit, and it's stayed alive since. So combine an active former-reddit community with lemmy and a good reason to all rally around, and finally the final ingredient of federation, and the Star Trek related rooms will always be on every server, and they'll always be populated.
Both this and all other answers are good for different reasons. From what I’m reading, the beliefs and politics displayed within Star Trek are beyond progressive for the time it came out, while also shaping sci-fi. This creates a very committed fan base that when Reddit started acting up, they were able to move a large chunk of their user base away to Lemmy, since Lemmy is filled with similar-minded people.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of it. The Star Trek sub’s total abandonment of Reddit and conversion to a standalone Lemmy instance during the Blackout was a big deal and a big driver of traffic in those days and beyond.
Star Trek is big in the Threadiverse for the same reason that Earth is big in the Federation. They were a massive force in the early days.
In an interview during the 90’s, William Shatner told of a story of him being recognized in mid-perfomance by a sword dancer in a small Iranian village. The man stopped dead in his tracks and looked straight at him uttering with utter amazement; “Captain Kirk?!?” That should give us perspective as to how deep and far Star Trek reached people for the last 51 years.
To this day the government is still trying to create a lot of the tech from Star Trek. They are actively working on warp technology, replicators for food and clothes etc and Star Trek was the basis for a lot of today’s computers (i.e. no tubes like old tvs and computers before the invention of the desktop computer).
One time the government actually approached the producers and wanted to know how they got the doors to open and close automatically like they do. Genes answer “there’s two men holding onto broom sticks, one on each side, when the actor walked up to the doors they would pull the broomsticks and make a ‘whooshing’ sound as they opened and closed them “
Now we have that tech on 90% of retail shop doors. Star Trek was the basis for a lot of tech we use now.
It’s sci-fi with good character development and moral conundrums. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t rely on flashy graphics. The characters are supportive of each other. Like if you took utopian leftist drama kids and told them to make a sci-fi show about humanity trying to do it’s best.
star trek mods successfully moved their communities from reddit back then. afaik the only other community with similar success is the piracy community.
Unfortunately, outside of the meme zone (i.e. !risa) there isn’t a whole lot of engagement anymore. Once the blackout was over, the reddit communities opened back up.
Well that sucks. I am guilty of really only following Risa, mostly due to big gaps in my watch history and wanting to avoid spoilers for the newer shows. I'm not surprised though... Reddit had (and still has) tremendous amounts of inertia.
Yeah, but DaystromInstitute kind of sucked. They didn’t have enough of a sense of humor. It didn’t need to be Risa, but they took themselves way too seriously.
There was a post the other day about how Reddit never took anything seriously and how the top comments were always predictable jokes that stopped being funny years ago.
It was nice to have places like Daystrom, Ask Science, etc. that were curated for serious discussion.
I’m not saying they should have all been jokes and memes, I’m saying they were a little too “everything must stick to a canon that isn’t especially coherent sometimes.”
Daystrom provided a place for a more academic-style analysis that would have been drowned out even on r/StarTrek which already didn’t allow low-effort.
Not for everyone, but it worked for those who liked it.
Because it’s the best space anime that’s why besides star begins with s and lemmy with l so if we take the two you have ls which is a command on GNU/Linux and other Unix like operating systems that shows the current place contents so you can literally see for yourself what you have to share as Commons thus you see when combined they do magic together by implementing communism but you know what the real is liberalism and political conservatism1111!! hahahaha wooowwwwwww
This is actually something i also noticed when i switched to lemmy from reddit. In reddit its all star wars and here its all star trek. I lean more in the star trek direction so im happy here
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