Thank you for looking into it!
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?
I think Discovery's general story convolution and continual escalating of stakes is largely a consequence of production staff turmoil from the first two seasons. It was Fuller, then Kurtzman, then Berg/Harberts, then back to Kurtzman, before finally settling on Paradise. No one was clearly in charge for more than one full season during the first two, and so it's kind of a mess—there are really 4 full arcs in the first 2 seasons with very minimal connection between them. Keeping the stakes high is an easy mode way of driving the story and that kept things together as people were rotating in and out.
Seasons 3 and 4 are far more coherent, but by that point "something threatens the entire galaxy and it's up to Burnham to save us" had calcified as Discovery's shtick, so we got two more of those. I'll be pretty surprised if season 5 isn't one final go at that story.
No worries. You're good, and your overall guideline for setting expectations is one I strongly agree with: be transparent about what the rules are.
Community rules are absolutely subordinate to instance rules and the instance rules are fully public. Therefore, Risa's written policy is no bigotry, and it always has been.
Of course that's the policy. I wouldn't have volunteered my time and effort to a project that didn't have that written in stone as a core principle.
Now, if that written policy is going unenforced by mods and admins... well that's a different story. But I'll be honest: I find that very hard to believe. I disagree with the content moderation approach endorsed by the admins of that instance, but in my experience they are all tolerant and empathetic individuals.
This answer you've given a few times now implies that /c/Risa allows bigotry and honestly, I take offense to that. I removed bigoted and uncivil comments the whole time I was modding either Risa under the same "no real rules" framework currently there. Risa has essentially the same rules about civility and tolerance that you have, applied instance wide.
The current problem with Risa isn't abstract. The lone mod is enforcing unwritten content rules.
/c/startrek@lemmy.world