Fleet Shard Mafia

Um... so like I've heard of these elusive Fleet Shard chats and I'm going to guess there's a Squad Shard chat; however, how does one go about even finding this chat area? I'm not in a chat for any of my shards. Is there a certain etiquette that we should know or something? Is this one of those unwritten rules?

Unfortunately, to get in, you are probably going to have to spend some crystals.  If you make it difficult to beat you or if you climb quickly with refreshes, they might invite you in rather than having to compete against you.  It took me years to finally have someone reach out to me.  The major advantage is coordinated climbing so that you don't have to fight everyone to get to your PO.  I would also recommend putting r9 on malgus, SA, and SET.  A mostly worthless investment, but it will make your Levi fleet a bit more of a pain to beat.

I'm currently ranked #18 in my Fleet Shard. And I hover anywhere between 8 - 20. I've been in this range for a while now?

In regards to the Levi information, that's good to know. Not sure if I have the relic mats yet for that. But bumping Malgus, SA and SET up to r8 until I can get POW and MQG to r9 for their AB to acquire droid brains sounds like a good plan.

"the reasoning was said to be because of shard chats/mafias blocking others out and ruling the payouts."

Where?

I heard rumours that the coordination between shard mates was maximizing crystal rewards for the player base - which was not intended. GAC did away with this and allowed them to lower the numbers of free crystals flowing to the player base. This has also flattened the crystal dispersement a little bit - which made it smell better. 
It certainly felt like there was an intention to do the same with the fleet arena - but they need to keep some motivation in place for people to work in ships.

“Shard mafias” are just the players who are regularly at the top cooperating with each other so they can maximize rewards and minimize time requirements and pain. Since the invention of changing payout times I haven’t heard of any shards that aren’t willing to cooperate with anyone who isn’t purposefully trying to mess with people. 
anyone who is competitive and isn’t already talking to their shard mates should start by sending them a message :)

my guildmates can change but I have been playing with my shard mates for years and years-

I have been a part of our arena shard for years before it went to gac. As I said, I've been trying to get in fleet forever. Hasn't worked. Told it was too busy and there are too many in there already. I wish fleet was like my character arena shard used to be.

Shard mafias were not at all the reason arena crystals moved to GAC. They made the move for two important metrics to increase: time in game (GAC takes between 30 and 90 minutes depending on how sweaty you want to get, while it took maybe 1-5 battles for a total of 3-15 minutes to climb once a day in arena), and wider account investment (instead of just having to invest in the newest GL and their team, you now have to invest in ALL the GLs, their teams, and other S and A tier teams, their Omis, and their DCs).

Ships don't have mods nor Omis nor DCs and I pray they never will, and they're already required in GAC, so it's unlikely they're going to dissolve crystals from Fleet arena as they did character arena. Keeping crystals there still drives spenders to R9 fleet commanders and get the new shiny 'GL' ship on day one for 21k crystals.

Spend more time playing fleet arena and you will be in the top. 

Totally enjoying all the responders that are saying "Fleet mafia?  There is no fleet mafia" identifying themselves as being in a fleet mafia.  😂