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):

[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.

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Maybe we could have fewer servers, but having been MoRA, I wouldn't have wanted all that stuff in the main server. I could see this being a complete mess of roles, with stuff not being updated when people change positions or leave. I feel like it's easier to see who's doing what with separate Ministry servers.

Did some LC, MoRA, CRS stuff in the past. Do a lot of World Census stuff now.

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I’ll have more to say in a bit, but for now:

Yes.

Both your point about ensuring consistency across roles and Islands’s point about ease of participation are especially important to me.

Clutter is absolutely not a concern. At risk of getting another “but we don’t have to compare ourselves to any other regions!!!1!” post— our main Discord is way underutilizes compared to most large regions’ servers. Plus, to be honest, most of the added channels from a server merge would be hidden behind permissions structures. A server with a ton of channels only a few of which are accessible with each specific role is not a cluttered server.

Maybe we could have fewer servers, but having been MoRA, I wouldn't have wanted all that stuff in the main server. I could see this being a complete mess of roles, with stuff not being updated when people change positions or leave. I feel like it's easier to see who's doing what with separate Ministry servers.

Having split servers already means roles and things aren’t updated when people change positions or leave. As Roavin mentioned, we have people masked as legislators in some servers who are not actually legislators anymore. Having many servers means even more role mess, because instead of having just one Citizen mask, there are eight different Citizen masks.

My one concern is ensuring that Ministers don’t lose any of the control they have right now. I’m quite optimistic that we can make that work with the use of bots and category-based permissions, so I’m still strongly in favour of merging. I just don’t want to get into the mode of deciding for ministers what they really need and what they don’t while we’re combining servers. We should be making it as easy as possible for ministers to choose what they want and need, as opposed to saying “now that we’re remaking ministry channels, let’s limit you down to three channels because that’s all you need”.

~ Aumeltopia ~

Raccoons are bandits! First they steal your food . . . and then your heart/identity!

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At risk of jumping the gun, this is being discussed in Cabinet and there is broad support from the executive branch to move forward with a unified server. The Prime Minister will have more to say about this in the near future.

Admiral General of the South Pacific

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My one concern is ensuring that Ministers don’t lose any of the control they have right now. I’m quite optimistic that we can make that work with the use of bots and category-based permissions, so I’m still strongly in favour of merging. I just don’t want to get into the mode of deciding for ministers what they really need and what they don’t while we’re combining servers. We should be making it as easy as possible for ministers to choose what they want and need, as opposed to saying “now that we’re remaking ministry channels, let’s limit you down to three channels because that’s all you need”.

I suppose technically there will inherently be some loss of control, but I don't think it'd be a deal breaker in any way. Changes usually happen just once a term during the transition period, and as I mentioned in OP, most changes are now window dressing rather than substantive things, and I see that across all three ministries - there should be a great deal of continuity as-is. Masking people can easily be facilitated with bot commands - in fact, it's the same thing as the !legislate command, which checks if the person has a mask and if so applies another mask to another person. Same deal, different mask.

Regarding channel limits, I know I've mentioned that in a backchannel previously but I've come to the light, so to speak - I don't see why a ministry couldn't have 6, 10, or even 15 channels for itself if they're all sensible and gated through selective visibility. I would still encourage ministries to take the opportunity to think a bit about what channels are actually needed, but if it's 15 ... then it's 15. For the most part, administrative comfort is less important than the comfort of the general user base.

At risk of jumping the gun, this is being discussed in Cabinet and there is broad support from the executive branch to move forward with a unified server. The Prime Minister will have more to say about this in the near future.

Exciting! I'd love to hear Cabinet's input on this, particularly as this affects them most.

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I’m for consolidating all these disparate servers. As a region, we’ve really gone overboard in spreading out information and requiring being in so many servers (and regions, for that matter) to be able to participate. There’s no good reason to not have a single Discord server, except for ministries just wanting to be territorial. To be frank, MoRA making things complicated isn’t a good enough reason to not do this. MoRA can change how they organize themselves.

That being said, I’m not a fan of the “new” here. Just use the server we already have, that already has so much history on it.

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I agree. I think we have an excess of channels in our primary server as it is. Prudent channel-creation is ideal.

Ideally, the ministries would all have three channels which form the skeleton and can conservative branch out with active 'project rooms' as needed.

Admiral General of the South Pacific

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Guys... I know you love to plan everything top-down, but I really think this is not going to work out if our message to Ministers going into it is "here's a plan we've set up for your ministry, now you'd better follow this conservative layout we've mandated".

Guidelines are good. Encouragement to be conservative with channel creation is good. A "you're going to be assigned these three channels" attitude is not.

The only way a unified server will be accomplished is if we're willing to compromise on our ideals of exactly what a unified server will look like. The only way we're going to get buy-in from the TSPers who currently run the separate ministry servers is if they feel that as little as possible is changing in their setup by moving to a unified server. Adding on extra regulation about what channels people can and can't make into the unified server package is 1) extraneous to the more important goal of actually combining things in the first place, and 2) likely to drive the core stakeholders away from the whole package entirely. If this were a piece of legislation, we'd say that attaching that kind of rider would be a poor political move.
 

That being said, I’m not a fan of the “new” here. Just use the server we already have, that already has so much history on it.

Agreed.

~ Aumeltopia ~

Raccoons are bandits! First they steal your food . . . and then your heart/identity!

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The only way a unified server will be accomplished is if we're willing to compromise on our ideals of exactly what a unified server will look like. The only way we're going to get buy-in from the TSPers who currently run the separate ministry servers is if they feel that as little as possible is changing in their setup by moving to a unified server. Adding on extra regulation about what channels people can and can't make into the unified server package is 1) extraneous to the more important goal of actually combining things in the first place, and 2) likely to drive the core stakeholders away from the whole package entirely. If this were a piece of legislation, we'd say that attaching that kind of rider would be a poor political move.

I mean, we should make able to make whatever changes are needed if we wanted to pull everything into one server. The only think might be the need for more admins/mods to keep everything up to date, but imo there's no reason we couldn't have a full section for each currently disparate server.

-tsunamy
[forum admin]

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I have said it once and will continue to say it until forever unless something drastic happens. I will always vote no on a unified server. 

I think that having seperate servers is a good thing. It keeps things cleaned up and it gives the Ministers the space they need to do their thing on their own agenda. It also allows them do have a say over things that they wouldn't have in a Unified server. People CHOOSE to join the servers if they are interested and I really don't see a determinant to them if the RA server is anything to judge by.

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There's a list somewhere if you wanna go looking. 

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