We've seen an increase in sign-ups on our instance lately, so the admin team felt it might be helpful to know what to expect from StarTrek.website as your home base in the Fediverse.

To give an idea of how we view this instance, the original URL we were considering was "startek.club". Our goal was never to be a "fan site" explicitly, but to feel like a social club for Trekkies and entry point to the "Threadiverse".

⭐What you can expect form us:

Active, aggressive moderation from our administrators and mods.

The admin team has decades of experience moderating on Reddit and we all have very low tolerance for inauthentic or aggressive behavior. If you feel that way too, you'll probably like it here. But if you're seeking raw, unfiltered Fediverse access, this isn't the instance for you.

The admin team actively defederates other instances, removes federated communities, and bans federated users for behavior that does not align with our core principles, even if those users/communities/instances have not interacted with our hosted communities in any way.

Everything you see on startek.website is ultimately hosted by us, even if the content originated on another instance. That means we have to consider what we are willing to host and what kind of experience we want to offer. In addition to the obvious stuff (spam, hate speech) here are some examples of types of non-obvious content/behavior we will moderate:

• Political propaganda
• "Snark"
• Drama/call-out communities
• Sealioning
• Reply guys

Unlike our local communities, we take a more laissez-faire approach when it comes to federated communities/users. This means we are not actively patrolling or holding federated content to the same standard as our own. We heavily rely on user reports and our own experience as users when it comes to taking action.

⭐What we expect from our users:

Our users are expected to be on their best behavior when interacting with federated communities.

Everyone with an account here is expected to respect other instance admin/mods time, effort, and mental health. This means adhering to our instance principles and terms of service in all communities accessed via startrek.website, even if the behavior is within the rules of the other community.

Keep in mind, whatever you say on the fediverse gets said here first, and our rules apply.

Our users are expected to actively participate in maintaining a positive culture.

As a user, you don't need to see someone blatantly spamming or harassing for us to consider taking action. If you see someone simply behaving in a way you don't like, report them and we will consider. We are a community unto ourselves, we are not beholden to advertisers or outside influence. We get to determine what kind of experience we want. 

This post has a mirror saved on our wiki. If you are curious about how we might approach something more specific please feel to ask in a comment!

Please let the admin team know if you notice any weirdness. See changes here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-03-19_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.10_and_Developer_AMA

• Fix Youtube thumbnails by increasing the metadata fetch limit to 1 MB #5266
• Also remove private messages when banning user with “remove content” (goodbye Nicole) #5414
• Ignore accept-language header if no site languages are specified, to avoid that users have English disabled and can’t see most posts #5485
• Enable english for users on instances with all languages enabled, to resolve the above problem #5489 #5493
• Only list local banned users under /admin #5364
• Add crawl-delay to robots.txt #3009

Also one of the main Lemmy developers will be doing an AMA in !announcements@lemmy.ml on the 25th.

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!