The idea isn't new, but it's time to have a broader and more formal conversation about it.

The situation now: We have about 8 TSP Discord servers, each with their own administration and moderation hierarchies. To do anything, people have to join that Discord server, and while we made it as easy as feasible with the #discord-index in the main server, that's still a bunch of servers to join, get masked in, etc.etc..

There are several reasons we got to this situation, and in each case the preconditions no longer apply.

• In the beginning (there was light), Discord didn't have categories to easily group and organize various channels. Now, it does.
  
• Discord didn't give many opportunities for a "opt-out" for channels in any way; these days, Discord supports mutes and auto-hiding of both channels and categories to allow users to tailor their experience to suit their interests.
  
• The ownership and administration of the main Discord server was an exceedingly sticky situation, with a now-blacklisted player gripping onto ownership of our server and selecting their own small and disjunct to administrate it. With the introduction of the Community Standards, we also unified the moderation teams across the platforms (technically the administration teams too, though that wasn't fully put into practice due to Discord limitations).
  
• The sort of channel and permission structures we had were heavily volatile because we were still learning how to best utilize Discord, and Minister used their autonomy to experiment with various setups. Nowadays, the differences in setups between successive ministers in pretty much all the ministries are mostly window-dressing.
  
• There was not much support for automation through the use of a bot; meanwhile, these days we can automate many things with Coco (for example, the !legislate and !unlegislate commands for LegComm) and we've not even come close to tapping the potential of that. Many of these kinds of things have existing modules that only need to be added to Coco, and if they don't exist, they can be added easily (such as the aforementioned !legislate command).
  

Meanwhile, there are a bunch of advantages to a unified setup.

• No longer is it possible that people are masked as different things in different servers; for example, there are people in the MoFA server masked as Legislators who no longer are and vice-versa.
  
• The Community Standards can now be enforced equally and fairly across the board.
  
• It's generally an easier user experience, because Discord still (after 5 years) isn't particularly good at representing multiple servers well, particularly on mobile. Servers easily get forgotten by users because of it when they are in many.
  
• ... and the most important one.
  

The most important one, in my opinion, deserves a special mention. I'll defer to selected portions of Islands' argument about this same issue a while back (note that this was in the context of OWL):

Quote:[1:41 AM] islands: How many times do we have to learn the same lesson that most people will not join another server to do something that could be done in the open
[1:44 AM] islands: Because we havent learned the lessons we should have
[1:44 AM] islands: Every other wa program ive seen is voted on in their delegate area or a wa area not tucked away in some server ive never heard of

[1:49 AM] islands: If we did a poll in the biscuit area we'd have the easy part down while leaving development hidden away

[2:03 AM] islands: If it was happening in front of people's faces theyd be a part of it

I can't help but feel he's right. People can still opt out of areas actively or passively through selective visibility, category and channel mutes, but it would be a better way to get people involved by easily showing them where they can get involved, no matter which ministry or department it may be.

Now, there are some reasonable arguments against unification; let me address the ones I can think of from the top of my head:

• Clutter - I don't think this is the case. Note that we have a bunch of channels in the main server which are mostly unused. Most of the public "functional" channels in the government category could easily be merged into a citizens/residents channel without any real loss of organization.
  
• Loss of Minister Automony - this is somewhat true, but again as I noted earlier, most of the changes between ministries these days are basically window-dressing. The ministries would still have their own backchannels, tucked away and visible to only those that need them, and if a Minister does need something special, I don't see why that can't be accommodated easily.
  
• ... and that's about it
  

Those are my thoughts on the matter, and I'd love to hear all of yours.