Happy to help! I would love it if you report back, we used to get 100 "How do I get a friend into Trek" posts/day on /r/StarTrek but very few follow ups on if it stuck!
"Data's Day" is actually a pretty great one to get someone into TNG, it's fun, but most importantly, Data is essentially walking around introducing all of the main characters to the audience.
I typically recommend starting with TNG in general (I used to say because it was "modern" 😭) as it naturally leads into DS9 and VOY. That said if your friend doesn't typically watch older shows but is open to them, then just starting with SNW or ENT is an excellent intro to the rest of Trek.
To be clear- this is just your personal "vibe" and not an actual fact, because the term "third world country" literally means a country that is not aligned with the US or USSR. If you meant "developing nation" that term also has a definition the US does not meet.
Is this just your vibes or do you have a source? Because I just checked the website of the organization this article is referencing and it says no such thing.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it's obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community's purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just "be nice". There's no wriggling around that because it's not some legal text. If someone is ""concerned"" about a request to "be nice" or "be honest", they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it's own preferred method of discussion.
Absolutely, if you're seeing propaganda, it's because it's allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.
Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it's context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.
There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don't need to know "how to identify a bot", they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".
This is an excellent thing to wear in public and wait for other Trekkies to notice.