StarTrek.website have been using the !startrek@startrek.website logo instance-wide since the beginning, and since we have been seeing above-average growth lately, the admin team figured it was time to zhuzh up our lil' Webzone with it's own identity:

...Get it?

We also have (mostly) completed a project I've been working on since the beginning, exclusive StarTrek.website custom animated emojis! Introducing:

I've-had-enough-of-your-nonsense Data:

I-would-like-more-of-your-nonsense Riker:

Are-you-shitting-me Tuvok

...And much, much more!

To use these, look here while making a post or comment:

Make it known around the Fediverse that you are a Website™ user! Characters from other series will be added periodically in the future (aka when I find the time)!

As always, thank you to our Patreon supporters for keeping us live! If you are interested in helping out with the bills, we have just one plan and it's $4.

We were previously on 19.5, so this is a double update. You can see the changes here. Most of the update is some back end stuff, ~~we are also looking into some federation delay with instances that haven't updated yet~~. The Federation delays appear to have been resolved on our end.

This instance has defederated from hexbear.net for violating our rules against propaganda as outlined in our Terms of Service. If you are unfamiliar, federation means two servers sync and host each other's content. Defederation stops us from syncing their content to our server.

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!

Maintenance was successful

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.

I just noticed today that old.startrek.website isn't loading properly. The fact that zero people have said anything to the admins makes me wonder if anyone's using it at all. So speak up if you are! I will be happy to fix it for you, but otherwise may just uninstall.

EDIT: It's fixed, we'll leave it for now

http://old.startrek.website/

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.