Hello everyone,
The former mods here have graciously decided to pass over the lead mod position to me so that we can continue to build a great place for PlayStation here on Lemmy. If you don’t know who I am, I am the lead mod over on !ps5@lemmy.world and I have been building a place for PS on Lemmy since just before the Reddit fiasco.
I am very active in the community and post regularly/daily about PS5 and PS news over on c/ps5. My co-mod over on c/PS5 (@slimerancher@lemmy.world) is also the lead mod on !nintendo@lemmy.world and they have done a tremendous effort building that community large and wide!
All this is to say…or rather ask you all a few questions:
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Should c/playstation and c/ps5 join forces? Lemmy as a whole is still very small, and I believe having subscribers divided across two largely similar communities is doing us a disservice. A larger community means more discussions, more comments, more everything.
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Should we remain separate? I know many of you likely joined c/playstation and c/ps5 for different reasons. Merging the communities might not be what you all want.
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Do you have different ideas from those above? Please let us know below!
The point of this post is to hear from all of you and gather feedback and ideas before any decision is made. Currently, I plan to release a survey to formalize the options and opinions of the community before we do anything. For now, this post is to inform you all of what is happening and see what you all think.
Edit:
Here is a link to the similar discussion post I posted over on !ps5@lemmy.world
I think the more conglomerating of similar communities we can do the better.
The main issue I have with the fediverse is that there are a dozen spaces dedicated to the same thing and it currently requires manual intervention to redirect the traffic.
Nobody really needs a community based around the console with the current userbase. It’s easy enough to discuss the aspects of the console on the main community for playstation overall.
I would suggest the same concept for sports teams - stop making individual communities, we don’t have enough people to go around – post in the league community for now, and we’ll spin up communities as needed when we grow.
We’ve set up way too many communities when the reddit fiasco happened that 80% of them are dead, empty void spaces.
How many of these communities do we really need?
Is it necessary to have a playstation general, and a playstation plus, and a playstation achievements, and every single released console? Seems like massive massive overkill especially considering we do not have enough people to fill the playstation general, let alone the other subcommunities.
Thanks for the feedback. For a little history, before lemmy.world was even a thing I had made a PS5 community on lemmy.ml. The PlayStation community on lemmy.ml was defunct and admins wouldn’t let me take it over. So I made PS5. After that lemmy.world started and someone made c/PlayStation and then I later migrated my PS5 community over to lemmy.world.
Just wanted to point out that I didn’t splinter from c/PlayStation. But I agree with the overall sentiment.
I would only get mad at you if you were to spin up an entire new Lemmy instance to spin up communities ;)
So you’re saying you don’t want a different PlayStation community for each PS5 software version? /s
ahem There are instances like that…
There are two different aspects to it. Examples:
There’s a community about something, let’s say PlayStation, and for some reason you don’t like how it’s run, (maybe you don’t like rules, or the mods, or the instance it’s hosted on), so you create a new / separate community. While this can fracture the communities, I think this is the strength of fediverse. This is how PS5 came to be, PlayStation was dead, so Cosmic created PS5.
Creating communities for sub-topics, or niche, for which general communities exist. Like for example creating PS5 community if PlayStation wasn’t dead and we had no issues with it. In this case, I agree with you, we currently don’t have a big enough userbase or engagement for that (at least not in most communities, there might be some communities big enough that require them to split into multiple ones), so that doesn’t make too much sense right now.
Either way, this is for when you are creating a community, if you have already made a community and there is a good amount of people subscribed to it, you can’t just do whatever you want.
Which brings us to the purpose of this thread. 😀 To gather the feedback from the community on how they wish to proceed.
Edit: Some formatting
I disagree that it’s a strength of the fediverse. In fact I consider it a major weakness because generally what ends up being the case is that malcontents disagree with really basic and standard moderation practices and go to make their own lawless community with blackjack and hookers. Ultimately what we end up with is either a dozen of the same communities that are mostly dead at best, or are repositories and landing pages for massive spam campaigns at worst.
So on top of fragmentation, you have a higher potential for mod power tripping, which itself can be caused by mod power tripping from the original community, but I hardly see that being the case. Every time I’ve seen somebody spin off a new instance or community on the grounds of disagreeing with moderation strategies, they were typically a band of assholes to begin with.
Well, then people joining have a choice, they can see if they they want the one that actual discussions and posts or the dead / spam campaign one. Choice is important.
That doesn’t sound like much of a choice. Go to where there’s content or go to where there’s spam? I feel like we should just eliminate the spam. It’s not an actual choice, it’s just a mess.