Happy to help! I would love it if you report back, we used to get 100 "How do I get a friend into Trek" posts/day on /r/StarTrek but very few follow ups on if it stuck!

"Data's Day" is actually a pretty great one to get someone into TNG, it's fun, but most importantly, Data is essentially walking around introducing all of the main characters to the audience.

I typically recommend starting with TNG in general (I used to say because it was "modern" 😭) as it naturally leads into DS9 and VOY. That said if your friend doesn't typically watch older shows but is open to them, then just starting with SNW or ENT is an excellent intro to the rest of Trek.

Big fan of that design but even more of Disco (Season 1 that is)

I thought this was going to be a video essay on Star Trek Phase II but I was pleasantly surprised

It doesn't meet the definition of "developing nation" either.

To be clear- this is just your personal "vibe" and not an actual fact, because the term "third world country" literally means a country that is not aligned with the US or USSR. If you meant "developing nation" that term also has a definition the US does not meet.

Is this just your vibes or do you have a source? Because I just checked the website of the organization this article is referencing and it says no such thing.

First of all, that's not what "Economic Freedom" means in the context of democracy, but more importantly "economic freedom" is not even a factor in the methodology used by the group this article is citing.

Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.

You sir, are worse than Hitler.

I know this comment is satire (well done... I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.

I'm clearly not paying enough for a therapist.

Plot twist: the kidnapper loves Star Trek but takes the opposite "Dear Doctor" position as you.

Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it's obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community's purpose.

For example we had a rule that was literally just "be nice". There's no wriggling around that because it's not some legal text. If someone is ""concerned"" about a request to "be nice" or "be honest", they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it's own preferred method of discussion.

99.99% of the time you see the phrase "power tripping admins" it means "Someone asked me to follow the rules".

It's very practical if you're somewhere without inertial dampeners.

The Fediverse (and FOSS in general) is inherently (radically) political simply by the nature of it's construction and organization. That said I think it's important to stress to new users that one's experience can be curated to the degree that normal social media cannot.

Until someone open-sources TikToks algorithm, the Fediverse cannot compete on entertainment value, what it competes on is quality and intentionality. I think it's important we put that talking point front and center. We don't need to convince the users who just want to scroll memes (even though this post is literall r/memes haha).

My least favorite fun fact is that Reddit forced the KiA mod to reopen after they went private calling it a "cancer".

I was a mod at the time and Reddit always told us we had an extreme degree of editorial independence (hence the justification for allowing r/jailbait, /greatawakening, r/coontown etc) but that event made me consider for the first time that exposing normies to propaganda might not just be a side-effect, but a core function of the company.

Urban dictionary says it's a term that refers to when an undercover government agent fails to blend in with whoever they're trying to blend in with.