We suspect this may have to do with their older Lemmy version as we're noticing it on some other instances as well, but not .ml which is running the latest.
Tesseract is great!
Defederation is the nuclear option. Until now we had removed any communities we weren't comfortable hosting, and treated users on a case-by-case basis based on how they behaved in our communities, which worked for a while but became untenable.
When we started this project the admin team felt that welcoming outsiders into our (wholesome, sane) Star Trek communities was the net-positive action. But as I said it became too much to handle so we unfortunately had to cut the cord.
I think Beehaw.org is. We're 2/3 as well (now). .ml has some communities/users we've removed, but largely speaking .ml users have not caused any issues on our hosted communities, and we feel exposing them to our (generally awesome) communities is the net-positive here. Honestly .world's (lack of) moderation is more actively an issue for our mods, but since they're so big and we're a niche instance we really can't afford to de-federate from them.
Bookstack is great!
You are correct that it is a requirement for all communities hosted on this instance to be actively moderated within instance principles.
I'm not against hosting a comics community, but it's also not like /c/StarTrek is overflowing with OC and I'm sure the mods would be happy to have comics content (and you happier with their 10k users).
Yeah I totally agree with pretty much everything you just said.
The problem is nobody wants to grow and maintain a federated "Trek adjacent" community. I've even offered the opportunity to host one on this instance and nobody wants to put in the effort.
(Also, I just need to point out that Stamets was not "right" about anything involving our team. He claimed the Risa mods were "transphobic", and set up a new community where he repeated the claims. When one of our Admins asked Stamets if he intended to continue, he cried harassment and used the attention to promote a GoFundMe.)
Per instance guidelines, submitting on-topic content to relevant communities is not considered spam. But if you want to stay subscribed to /c/STO and block ValueSubtracted's "spam" StarTrek.website has a block feature you can find on their userpage.
@ptz@dubvee.org Tagging you here because you're basically the only other person who contributes to this community.
Straight jump, no issues that I've noticed thus far.