Some of those guidelines are very reasonable!

Some of them are explicitly disallowing things that would otherwise be legal, which makes me angry.

For example:
- You can't register the copyright of the things you've produced, because you produced them in service of Star Trek? Bullshit, that I hate.

- You can't sell merch for your fan production, even if you don't use any Paramount owned shit in it? Bullshit that I hate.

- No physical media? Fuck that!

- You can't pay anyone involved? That's fucking bullshit!

- Anyone who has ever been in a Star Trek thing can't participate. Why? (Specifically to exclude Tim Russ and George Takei, presumably, but also perhaps to exclude James Cawley and others who were involved in existing fan productions who had *also* cameoed in various actual Star Trek productions.)

And then, of course, no more than 15 minutes per thing, and no more than two things per group. No sequels, no series, no seasons, nothing of proper episode length.

(After all that, I found a better wiki.)

So, what is #JupitersGhost / #Intergalactic.social / the #SolarFederation

Ever dreamed of stepping into the background of your favorite sci-fi show? To explore deep space, make a home on a distant station, or be part of a crew navigating a vast, complex galaxy? Your chance is here!

Intergalactic Social is a collaborative fiction site and the central hub for the Solar Federation Universe.

Think of it as an in-character social network where you can create a character and help build an open, shared universe alongside other creators. All content is licensed CC-BY-SA, so the stories we tell together are free to grow and evolve!

Alright, so what is this #JupitersGhost thing I've been talking about for, god nearly 10 years?

This is a history post. After the history post I'll do a more concise pitch. Feel free to ignore this if you're only interested in the current state of the world, and not how we got here.

I started working on Jupiter's Ghost in 2016 or thereabouts. The earliest doc I can find has a created date of November 2016, but it isn't the original proposal, so sometime before that.

The initial proposal was basically my response to that old tumblr post about humans as space orcs. I wrote a bunch of backstory and then wrote about a couple of characters on a spaceship getting lost in deep space and I shared it with some friends.

Several rounds of riffing later and the Space Orc element had fallen by the wayside, and the focus was instead on collaborative/roleplay centered storytelling in a shared science fiction universe.

Over the following years a bunch of us worked together on this concept, building the universe out into something pretty broad (which I'll discuss in more detail in the next post.)

My long dormant collaborative, crowd sourced, creative commons cc-by-sa licensed podcast about the crew of a spaceship in the distant future is in the slow process of awakening from hibernation.

We have a video game (beta out now, full release sometime this fall), a comic book in the works, and a line of action figures (from @MountainTownToys ) in progress.

We've been recruiting new crew people, and I'm getting a bunch of the technical stuff sorted so that we can have a much fuller #rp #roleplay experience.

The in universe announcement is here https://social.intergalactic.computer/@jandrews/statuses/01K46F89TZ8G6PHZCYZYEG8RC0