dominates the federation

Well there you have it.

I think it's nerds. /s

I think a lot of the lemmy userbase are at least somewhat techy (also see the Linux communities), and a lot of techy people like Star Trek.

The Star Trek community has been going strong for nearly 60 years for a reason - Star Trek rocks.

When it started in the 60s (and continued especially strong with TNG in the 80s), it was unique in depicting a hopeful look at how things could be rather than a reflection of how things are, differing from how most shows do social commentary. It's refreshing.

Star Trek is attractive to people who want to see a world where people work together toward great things in a post-scarcity utopia, with current day conversations of race, nationality, sex, gender, etc. being so far in the rear-view mirror that they're non-issues. Plus cool technology. I think that appeals to the Lemmy crowd.

So others have already talked about how great Star Trek is. I agree with them, but I think that literally everyone has missed the point of your question:

https://startrek.website

It's its own lemmy instance. It was spawned from the migration away from reddit, and it's stayed alive since. So combine an active former-reddit community with lemmy and a good reason to all rally around, and finally the final ingredient of federation, and the Star Trek related rooms will always be on every server, and they'll always be populated.

Asking why Star Trek dominates the Federation? tsk tsk tsk

no other franchise I know of that dominates the federation as much as Star Trek does.

You answered your own question, brother.

Most of the internet was started with Star Trek boards. If I recall correctly, one of the first emails ever sent was about Star Trek

We may never have a good answer for why the gay nerdy communists love the colorful scifi communist space adventures

there is also a lot of communities about programming and linux

there's only 1 common denominator here. we are all nerds

Guys guys, they're talking about us!

Same reason Linux is popular on Lemmy. Lemmy is essentially an explicitly leftist community that appeals to people nerdy and techy enough to leave Reddit and join a smaller platform. Linux is a FOSS, ie leftist techy OS. Star Trek is leftist Sci-Fi.

Nerds, tech, and leftism all congregate on Lemmy.

because star trek has long been welcoming to gay and trans people for their inclusiveness and the fediverse is home to a lot of nerds and gay or trans (or both) people. 💕

Almost like it's some kind of federation...

star trek mods successfully moved their communities from reddit back then. afaik the only other community with similar success is the piracy community.

Star Trek just kinda kicks ass.

What, you haven't seen Deep Space Nine?? Cmon what're you doing? Fix that!

Star Trek (esp 90s Trek and esp TNG) is extremely formative for most Gen Xers and Millennials. It's unapologetically nerdy and has themes of tolerance and empathy, and establishes a utopian vision for the future that (to most people) is unfathomable. When we're not on Lemmy, we're talking about Trek with people in person.

Are you telling me there aren't enough star trek communities?

Because Babylon 5 ended in 1998 and the reboot isn't even in production yet. Also MGM doesn't have the faintest idea what it's supposed to do with Stargate.

In an interview during the 90's, William Shatner told of a story of him being recognized in mid-perfomance by a sword dancer in a small Iranian village. The man stopped dead in his tracks and looked straight at him uttering with utter amazement; "Captain Kirk?!?" That should give us perspective as to how deep and far Star Trek reached people for the last 51 years.

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-number-of-Star-Trek-fans-worldwide

Anecdotally I have the impression a lot of North American Lemmy users are technology professionals and enthusiasts in their 40s and 50s and therefore many would also be Trekkies from the 20th century.

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

(Also, DS9 was the best.)

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.

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.

I’d been hearing talk of Lemmy as a potential Reddit alternative around the third party app debacle, but nobody seemed to be taking it terribly seriously until I saw the Star Trek subreddits open startrek.website for themselves.

That got me interested. It was the first instance I can remember of one of the bigger communities I followed just up and moving like that, and it made the whole thing feel more real.

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.

Ok but what is star trek

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.

Nerds.

Can't star trek across the fediverse without multiple space docks.

Just watch for the Klingons on the starboard bow.

By my count there are 914 different episodes/movies, that’s a ton of content!

This is actually something i also noticed when i switched to lemmy from reddit. In reddit its all star wars and here its all star trek. I lean more in the star trek direction so im happy here

Federation.

As others have said, Federation.

I expect it was a random first arrival bias.

Other sci-fi series? What "other sci-fi series"?

EDIT: I wasn't asking for recommendations, and honestly nothing you can offer will measure up to the glory that is Star trek. Soz all, LLAP 🖖