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!
The problem is nobody wants to grow and maintain a federated "Trek adjacent" community. I've even offered the opportunity to host one on this instance and nobody wants to put in the effort.
(Also, I just need to point out that Stamets was not "right" about anything involving our team. He claimed the Risa mods were "transphobic", and set up a new community where he repeated the claims. When one of our Admins asked Stamets if he intended to continue, he cried harassment and used the attention to promote a GoFundMe.)
I think you guys actually need more open communities and not less.
Quark's is great as an off-topic zone. The theme makes sense because the bar is somewhere people go to unwind and not necessarily talk direct shop. Stuff like news that's Trek-adjacent fits perfectly in here, but the subsequent topics listed after other sci-fi television kind of deserve their own community. I think the scope of Quark's is too large.
Navigating the fediverse and server meta have traditionally been their own communities as a /c/meta sort of affair. Those are definitely things that only the @stw community would really want to discuss internally and perhaps should be kept instance-user-only, but something like news and other "adjacent" content is of value across the federation and the opportunity for everyone to post just makes more organic sense to me. I would also take the opportunity to have another themed name, like /c/battlebridge, /c/ops or even /c/conferenceroom for the meta community.
Yeah I totally agree with pretty much everything you just said.