I’ve tried to get into STO multiple times over the years and I’ve always found it to be frustratingly buggy. It’s not unplayable, but it has enough bugs in it that I get annoyed and stop playing at about the same point each time.
The ship combat works decently well and is fun, but the ground combat is really rough in my experience.
If you’re looking for the hopeful view of humanity’s future, I’d start with Season 3 of The Next Generation. It has that in spades, while also skipping over the first two seasons where it is really trying to find its footing. If you really like it and want to see how it all started, go back and watch the first two seasons.
If you like TNG and want a more character-driven experience that doesn’t focus nearly as much on exploration, Deep Space Nine is fantastic. Just like TNG, the first two seasons are kind of rough as they try to figure things out. They’re also a fair bit slower (some call them dull) than the later seasons, but if you like character and world building, they’re pretty decent. It really gains steam with season 3.
If you want to continue the theme of exploration, Star Trek Voyager is good. I don’t enjoy it as much as TNG and DS9, but Voyager has the advantage of the show runners and writers having fully figured out what life is like in that time period without the stumbles of the first two series. I’d say it remains fairly consistent throughout, but I personally don’t find that its highs are as high as TNG and DS9.
She did such a fantastic job making a character that I absolutely despised. It never once felt like she was acting. I hated her so much that I was concerned that if I met her in person I’d reflexively hate Louise Fletcher instead of Kai Winn just because she felt every bit as real as the actual actress.
I’ve tried multiple times to get into the game. While the ship combat is fun, the away mission combat is a complete mess. In general, the game feels really unpolished and I just don’t have the energy to put up with bugs anymore.
I don’t think the fediverse as it currently exists will draw a significant amount of people away from the larger social media communities, but who knows? My partner isn’t particularly tech-savvy and she was on Mastodon without me ever having mentioned it to her. She was also the first person between us to use PixelFed.
I feel like the fediverse in its current incarnation is much like the early internet. It has a lot of promise, but most people on it are those who are enthusiasts and/or idealists. If the fediverse becomes easier to engage with over time, I can see it growing in appeal. If the fediverse equivalent of a killer app or high-profile voice gets established, we could see some huge growth.
I think that one of the hurdles it will face is that hosting these instances isn’t free. With the centralized apps, they have VC funding they can burn through while they try to figure out how to monetize their service and to build it to be robust enough to be stable while handling growth.
What happens when a large instance has to pull the plug due to lack of funding, or they fail because they get hacked and/or don’t have working backups, or the person/people who run it turn out to have an agenda? How things move on from those disruptions will be very telling for the future of the fediverse. They’re all things that could happen, and I’m sure at least one of them will happen at some point.
I really hope they put ST in the hands of someone who actually seems to like ST for what it is. I don’t think that’s what will happen, though.
I never vibed with Twitter or Instagram, so I struggled with both Mastodon and Pixelfed. It wasn’t until I started looking for content based around my hobbies that Pixelfed really started becoming interesting to me. That, and having the ability to be absolutely deluged in pictures of cats if I need a morale boost. Mastodon is still something that I’m having trouble getting value out of. I may just end up being a Lemmy and Pixelfed user.
The ground sections absolutely feel tacked on. They were what would end up killing my interest. That, and the F2P model in general makes for a bad experience in my opinion.