Eh. I can see it working.

Humans are social creatures. We like to feel useful and connect with others. In a world with a replicator in every home, dining out is much more about the social experience than the food. Working in a restaurant would be about community and shared interest. People would volunteer to staff them for the same reason people do any form of volunteer work: they enjoy the sense of purpose, skill-sharing, and camaraderie that comes with it. Plus, with replicators making preparation and cleanup trivial, there’s a lot less labor associated with food service.

Lastly, consider that post-scarcity dining establishments that would have no tolerance for rude customers. If someone went full Karen on a volunteer, they’d be banned in a hot second. The social dynamics of such an arrangement would entirely favor the staff: if there are no “paying customers” then there’s no entitlement to go with it.

I don’t find it all that difficult to envision a set of social incentives that would keep restaurants alive.

Picard: “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity”

Tilly: “I went to Elon Musk junior high school”

I dunno about favorite, but my go-tos are an Old Fashioned in the fall and winter, and a Tom Collins in spring and summer.

Those become a Manhattan or an Aviation if I’m feeling fancy or just want to mix it up.

Creator or Daystrom here: the conditions that created Daystrom eleven years ago don’t exist on Lemmy. More simply, Lemmy isn’t big enough to host a new Daystrom.

I made Daystrom because /r/startrek was so full of memes and jokes that it was increasingly difficult to have an actual discussion about Trek. Discussion posts were drowned out between low-effort posts like memes and jokes and even if you did get a discussion prompt to garner some votes, the thread itself would have a bunch of jokes at the top, because jokes are easy to upvote. If you wanted actual discussion, you had to go hunt for it.

On Lemmy, the meme subreddits have already taken off and so it’s unlikely that StarTrek@lemmy.world is going to be flooded with memes. StarTrek@lemmy.world is so small that if you posted a discussion prompt right now, it would very likely be the top post in the community for the next 24 hours.

Now of course, there’s no guarantee that if you posted a discussion prompt in StarTrek@lemmy.world, the answers won’t be jokes and dismissive replies. For whatever reason, Trekkies love to respond with comments like “the real answer is ‘don’t think about it!’” which is mildly rude, honestly: if someone makes a thread about it, obviously they would like to think about it. But, outside of the very largest communities on Lemmy, there is so little comment activity that it’s easy enough to sift through the replies and discuss with people who would like to discuss.

One could make a community that enforces Daystrom’s two key rules: only discussion prompts allowed, and no memes/jokes/dismissive comments. But daystrominstitute@startrek.website exists… and it’s pretty much dead. Enforcing these rules in a place as small as Lemmy comes across as heavy-handed.

So, tl;dr if you want “Daystrom on Lemmy,” I invite you to post discussion prompts to StarTrek@lemmy.world.

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?

It’s common enough that /r/startrek developed a reputation for being unfairly draconian with their moderation which spread beyond Reddit. I knew they were really in trouble when I encountered comments about how bizarre and punitive their moderation style is in places like Twitter, Mastodon, and YouTube comments. Every once in a while I would see someone recommending Daystrom to someone who was banned from /r/startrek because the “mods aren’t as strict,” which is wild when you think about it: Daystrom has many pages of very specific rules and they are all actively enforced.

It’s pretty harsh and I’m biased because I’ve had some fun conversations about Star Trek with Value, but… no it’s probably not unfair. My interactions with them never reached this level of intensity because I just left, but the stubbornness has always been there.

Fuck it, lets kick this drama starship into transwarp. I am the creator of /r/DaystromInstitute, /r/Risa, I modded /r/startrek for about a year, and I helped to create startrek.website. AMAA.