lemmy is created by and for techy dorks, star trek is for the same audience. Many of us are also communist or otherwise leftist, and star trek has done more for us than any other media. Major Nerys Kira, after which one of hexbear's admins is named, was an explicitly violent terrorist who helped liberate her people from a fascist occupation, and she never gets mistreated because of it. Queer content on star trek has not been perfect, but was beter than anywhere else on TV for a long time because they had freedom to explore different ideas about gender and sexuality(when berhman wasn't breathing down their necks) due to sci-fi having the excuse of being a fictional alien species. THe first inter-racial kiss on tv was from star trek, another point in the shows favor. There's also a whole episode where a characrer becomes a Marxist, so coolest shit ever made. . I could go on for hours, but the bottom line is that it's just peak fiction.
Others have brought up other reasons, but one I haven't seen is simply the depth of material to work with. Trek has had multiple multi-season series and tons of movies, which means you can basically find the right image for any meme if you watch enough of it.
Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
(Also, DS9 was the best.)
I'm not that into Star Trek but until other scifi communities I'm actually into get as active as Star Trek, I'll be hanging out with the trekkies.
Can't star trek across the fediverse without multiple space docks.
Just watch for the Klingons on the starboard bow.
Man, there's a dedicated instance for yiff.
Compared to that, star trek is a million times more popular lol.
But, like other people have said, it's a huge thing. Star Trek is one of, if not the most successful TV universe. It crossed into movies, comics, books, toys, everything. The "brand" spans most of a human lifetime so far, and has done so with a surprisingly minor degree of fuckery that insults the fan base.
So you end up with generations of fans, across all kinds of demographics.
It's science fiction. And there's not many ~~hives of scum and villainy~~ places online that are more sci-fi friendly than lemmy; even mastodon isn't quite as sci-fi loving.
But you may be missing that star wars has a ton of related C/s as well. There's dedicated sci-fi C/s scattered around. Compare that to genres like fantasy or westerns, and you start to see the trend leaning that way.
But, you're right that it is a disproportionate thing. The only "brand" that seems to be as universal as trek on lemmy is LOTR, and that's a foundation of fantasy as a whole.
I think open source is a very Star Trek-ish Idea, so it's natural that people from that community like a show with similar values.
The United Federation of Planets
But in this case with servers running Lemmy
It's not my thing but I appreciate just how much depth and substance Star Trek has to it and the sci-fi theme is a perfect fit for most people who frequent Lemmy.
Because Star Trek (the old stuff, not the new stuff) is for nerds, and Lemmy is also for nerds.
star trek is optimistic about the future and that's basically nonexistent in post-cold war SF
In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets is the interstellar government with which, as part of its space force Starfleet, most of the characters and starships of the franchise are affiliated.
To this day the government is still trying to create a lot of the tech from Star Trek. They are actively working on warp technology, replicators for food and clothes etc and Star Trek was the basis for a lot of today’s computers (i.e. no tubes like old tvs and computers before the invention of the desktop computer).
One time the government actually approached the producers and wanted to know how they got the doors to open and close automatically like they do. Genes answer “there’s two men holding onto broom sticks, one on each side, when the actor walked up to the doors they would pull the broomsticks and make a ‘whooshing’ sound as they opened and closed them “
Now we have that tech on 90% of retail shop doors. Star Trek was the basis for a lot of tech we use now.
It's popular, very memeable, has a long history, and most importantly: there's 2-3 series of it running right now. So it's topical and being engaged with.
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