It certainly shows that the federation doesnt need a weird shadowy organization to skirt the rules and make morally ambiguous decisions.

I feel like the big issue is the difference in how it’s portrayed. In DS9 and even enterprise section 31 are the bad guys. They are portrayed as a shadowy organization that thinks it’s doing the right thing but when confronted gets in the way. In DS9 they even lose. Section 31 arent an example of the end justifying the means being a necessary evil, they are something from within for the idealistic federation to overcome and defeat.

As a concept section 31 doesnt make a whole lot of sense lore wise because the federation is a paramilitary organization. Sure they are scientists, explorers, and philosophers at heart, but they are also very much a military Navy. We also see that starfleet does have a non section 31 intelligence complete with spies that go deep undercover get the trust of their enemies and sell them out. The federation knows the galaxy is a hostile place which is why they explore in heavily armed warships with a crew that follows a strict chain of command.

I think part of the wish fulfillment and idealism of the federation lies in the implication that they are also very powerful and able and willing to defend themselves with great force. Even the cruise ship Enterprise D was able to take on multiple enemy warships at once and win.

The major difference between section 31 and standard federation operating procedures seems to be their appetite for genocide and civilians.

It is a thing that has made me nervous about this new project since it was announced. Section 31 appearing as a bump in the road for our idealistic federation members to deal with works and allows them to stay the badguy. Them as the protagonists of a show or movie puts us in a situation where we get told stories where the ends justifies the means. And they either do this by making the federation seem naive and incompetent(which they arent they have a prime directive where they sterilize all life on a planet) or it has them justifying some heinous crap.

The concept of a trek sitcom seems a little silly and much, but with lower decks eventually coming to an end it does leave an opening for more lighthearted comedy startrek. Still I feel animation allows for more and easier shenanigans.

Yeah and in addition to that the overall “be(e) nice” rule means that people are generally just a lot more pleasant to be around and less abrasive than what I see in some of the other larger instances.

Only issue is I recently opened another account because theyre leaving lemmy eventually and currently my posts dont federate and all my subscriptions are pending.

Wouldnt the foreign influencer in the context of this comment tree be china though?

Yeah before the reddit migration the top instances were lemmygrad and a far more stalinist friendly lemmy.ml . Beehaw was also there but beehaw didnt have open registration and the process also became bugged out around the time the expansion happened so people would write their application to join and get no notifications or anything that they were in. Also beehaw manually reviewed the accounts at the time so it was a slow process.

Other large instances also didnt want to become the largest one while .world wanted to grow at all costs. With open registration and didnt even require emails at first(which honestly reddit didnt either for a while, but reddit had better mod tools for its time)

I mean theyre trying to keep a chill and civl environment and the mods are volunteers who got tired of having to put up with a disproportionately large amount of comments from very specific instances. Since the mod tools they need in order to better handle this influx wasnt there they took the nuclear option. Something which they did not do lightly.

You can check out: https://beehaw.org/instances

and see they blocked a lot, but most of what they blocked was trash and they are federated with way more instances.

They do plan on leaving though. They predate the reddit bump by more than a year and they only wanted to be a smaller online community and not a reddit replacement and they havent been able to get the tools they need patched into lemmy.

Lol yeah I just migrated my account away from beehaw because they do plan on leaving eventually and it’s kind of jarring how much more low effort posting there is now.

This isnt really true about beehaw though. Their mods actually have really good heads on their shoulders when it comes to policy and enforcement.

Their goal is to protect the general vibe of the place and their prime rule beyond of course not being a bigot is to “Be(e) Nice”. Discussions are meant to be had in good faith and if someone is say spready hate speech and someone tells them to fuck off the mod will likely bad(and depending on what they said delete) the hater and probably do nothing to the person who told them to fuck off.

They will go after people who are arguing in bad faith, trolls, people who are being too aggro for no reason, and of course people getting into a fight who need to cool it.

Their more simplified ruleset is to combat what is often seen when you have the more reddit style strict rules. Where you wind up with users knowing just how to be a dickhead without actually breaking the rules and ruin the place. If a mod bans or deletes a post when the person isnt breaking a rule but stinking up the subreddit then the user causes drama towards the “abusive mod”. So the mods then put in more and more rules until the subreddit becomes bland or hostile towards posters. In this example if someone posts hate speech and someone calmly just tells them to fuck off then both posters will have to be penalized for breaking rules.

The beehaw system allows for discretion. Ive also seen admins and mods on that site try and talk things out with posters who are causing a stink and giving them a good faith opportunity before showing them the door.