Creator or Daystrom here: the conditions that created Daystrom eleven years ago don’t exist on Lemmy. More simply, Lemmy isn’t big enough to host a new Daystrom.

I made Daystrom because /r/startrek was so full of memes and jokes that it was increasingly difficult to have an actual discussion about Trek. Discussion posts were drowned out between low-effort posts like memes and jokes and even if you did get a discussion prompt to garner some votes, the thread itself would have a bunch of jokes at the top, because jokes are easy to upvote. If you wanted actual discussion, you had to go hunt for it.

On Lemmy, the meme subreddits have already taken off and so it’s unlikely that [email protected] is going to be flooded with memes. [email protected] is so small that if you posted a discussion prompt right now, it would very likely be the top post in the community for the next 24 hours.

Now of course, there’s no guarantee that if you posted a discussion prompt in [email protected], the answers won’t be jokes and dismissive replies. For whatever reason, Trekkies love to respond with comments like “the real answer is ‘don’t think about it!’” which is mildly rude, honestly: if someone makes a thread about it, obviously they would like to think about it. But, outside of the very largest communities on Lemmy, there is so little comment activity that it’s easy enough to sift through the replies and discuss with people who would like to discuss.

One could make a community that enforces Daystrom’s two key rules: only discussion prompts allowed, and no memes/jokes/dismissive comments. But [email protected] exists… and it’s pretty much dead. Enforcing these rules in a place as small as Lemmy comes across as heavy-handed.

So, tl;dr if you want “Daystrom on Lemmy,” I invite you to post discussion prompts to [email protected].