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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

https://lemmy.world/post/5350368

  • sadbehr@lemmy.nzEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    My vote is for consolidating the two. If there is ever a need in the future it can be split again.

    Thanks for all the works you do.

    • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the feedback! I was considering making a survey in the future but if the sentiment is overwhelmingly in one direction then I might not have to. So far everyone is wanting to merge.

      • chrisphero@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I also vote for a consolidation of the two. As others have mentioned, we are unfortunately not that big (yet) and therefore one big community with everything related to playstation would be a good thing.

        I really love the Fediverse, but one weakness is for sure the splintering of communities in many small very specific ones, where none of them get many traffic.

        Also thank you for you work!

  • slimerancher@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Well, I don’t know about the rest, but I have heard great things about that slimerancher guy you mentioned.

  • almar_quigley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I would love to see us consolidate down to just this community. I’m a member of both but I think 1 generic PS /c would be best to start building out better discussions and hopefully drive adoption. Having multiple just allows to divide up the discourse and then I see the same things posted multiple times. Consolidating to this community also gives it longevity for the next console and any not ps5 specific topic as well.

  • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • slimerancher@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      There are two different aspects to it. Examples:

      1. 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.

      2. 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

      • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • slimerancher@lemmy.worldMEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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.

  • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    My completely unqualified opinion:

    The main community should be the all encompassing community. Because whenever a more niche community gets excited for the next game or whatever in line, say like the battlefield series, either the sub is going to want to talk about it or everyone has to move to another place.

    Playstation should be the main place, while ps5 just has a post saying please go join the Playstation community. Then just have everyone tag what console or whatever they want to talk about.

    Everyone’s too divided now. Let’s not divide ourselves even with the things we all love.

    • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Great feedback. I believe tags are in the works for Lemmy as a whole. Once it is available we can utilize them to help with filters and to categorize content.

  • Jordan Lund@lemmy.oneEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I see it like this…

    Playstation should be for the brand as a whole… PS1-5, PSP, Vita, PSVR1-2.

    PS5 is, well, PS5. :)

    When the PS6 comes out, Playstation will still be relevant, PS5 will not, and we’ll need a PS6.

    • almar_quigley@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      But I don’t think there’s enough content right now to justify multiple communities. I feel like combining them into a single PlayStation community for now would make the most sense. Actually foster conversation in a single place so we can get some discourse on topics going.

        • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          The main thing right now is that PS5 news dominates. We had coordinated with the old c/PlayStation mods from the very beginning to keep PS5 news on c/PS5 so that other PlayStation related news and discussions should have some room to breathe. That was the direction they wanted for c/PlayStation, whereas we always wanted c/PS5 to be a news and discussion focused community. Unfortunately due to a lack of content it appears c/PlayStation has been stagnant. Ultimately I believe that there is more demand for PS4/5 and PSVR2 content then there is a community desire for PS4 though PSX content. If we merge we will allow this content obviously, but the nature of the merge and the demand will be that ps5 news will dominate. Anyone in support of the merge will need to be ok with this inevitability.

  • AgentGrimstone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I prefer a merge. At our current numbers, I think it’s best to get us all together and get this place as active as possible, at least for now. PS1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever, I’m here for it.

    • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for your feedback! I have opened a vote thread pinned here in this community. Make sure you vote your preference by upvoting the corresponding comment, Yes or No. (downvotes will be ignored)