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!
I just don’t see how closing everyone else out from Trek adjacent discussions helps the community.
The whole point of federation is letting people with varied interests come together. It doesn’t work if every niche interest makes their “general” board private.
I mean, if we're talking about the sidebar...
But I do understand and appreciate the perspective. It's in-line with the internal discussion we had when making the decision.
But aren’t all Trek-related discussions on-topic?
If you’re going to ban “outsiders” from off-topic chat, you should also ban on-topic chat from the off-topic community.
If the concern is that we're going to have a sooper secret, members-only Star Trek discussion group, that is not the intent. If we were going to do that, we'd just make the instance private.
No, I’m concerned about balkanization of the community of Trek fans.