Mothership diaries have served a long and valiant purpose at Daily Kos. From political events through disasters like the BP oil spill and the current reactor crisis in Japan, they've provided a mechanism to draw together numerous diaries and ever-changing information. It's understandable that they've become not just a ingrained habit, but beloved.
However it's now time to land the motherships and turn off the lights, because there's a much better way to handle it in DK4. In short: use groups.
Since the DK4 platform went live a month ago, some communities with shared interests have embraced groups and taken advantage of the abilities available. Readers and Book Lovers is a terrific example of how diaries that share a loose connection can be pulled together as a group, providing improved visibility, increased readership, and making it easier for people with interest in this topic to better locate diaries as they appear. I end up reading many more diaries on this topic, by a wider array of authors, simply because they've done such a good job with groups.
Other sections of the site are still operating more or less as they did in DK3. Most notably, the organization of breaking events around "motherships" and a series of associated diaries. This is true even though the mothership diaries themselves are often placed in a group.
Groups offer a number of obvious organizational advantages. The effort that it takes to keep discussion of an ongoing event up to date can be daunting. The result is that mothership diaries are often filled with discussion of scheduling, links to associated dairies, the back and forth work of lining up updates, and rough patches of new info. Rather than operating as a fast way to keep up with events, they are by their nature often very low in information density, and very high in items that are difficult for someone looking for information on the central topic to parse. The mothership diaries and the whole rec / unrec process of moving them forward are unnecessary.
By forming a group, all that effort can be moved to the background. You can have as many people as you want involved, keep organizational messages out of the comments, post updates as often as you desire, and handle all the scheduling in a way that lets diaries appear regularly without someone sitting up bleary-eyed at 2AM waiting to press a button. Nobody has to "unrec" a diary.
Sure, some people may assume that the mothership provides some visibility advantage, but it only does so if hundreds of people keep pushing forward a diary that in itself is just a bulky envelope -- a clumsy duplication of the power offered by a group. And for people new to the site they are an oddly named, hard to navigate, ugly way of handling information that can be summarized succinctly in a link to a group. They're not only too much work for the benefit they return, it's not clear that they are a benefit. They're just an old habit.
Despite the emotional attachment, motherships are... well, clearly not extinct. But they should be.