My initial thought is definitely yes for the Steam Machine, and maybe yes for the Steam Frame.
All devices are Valve made hardware running steamOS, so I would think a lot of the discussions/content would apply to Steam Deck. This also isn’t a super busy community, so I wouldn’t be that worried about Steam Deck specific content getting buried.
The Steam Frame is a bit more iffy than the Steam Machine though, there’s a lot of experience differences between the Deck/Machine and a VR device, so there will be larger differences. Also the Frame has ARM hardware and has to use an additional x86 to ARM compatibility layer for games running on it, so we’ll probably see some unique compatibility bugs for it.
Overall though I just want to hear everyone else’s opinions on it.
I’d say yes. If the volume becomes overwhelming new communities can easily be created.
Agreed, the fediverse is small enough now that living aggregate communities are preferable to dead specific ones. Especially because everyone hates posting something, getting their post removed and being told to go post in another very similar community they didn’t know existed. As you said, if it becomes a problem you can just spin off
Fragmented communities is such an annoying problem in the fediverse.
I’d love to see them included, honestly. it seems they’re all part of the same family.
Absolutely. I would rather have one great community instead of 3 hyper specific communities. It just needs to have flags like [steamdeck] [ steammachine] [steamframe] Or even shorthand sd, sm, sf.
Yes.
We are the niche of a niche. We need more content, as long as it’s relevant.
I am completely fine with having this community for steam hardware. I don’t think it would be beneficial to have 10 smaller communities instead of one big. Lemmy is not a huge platform at the moment
Yes. Anything to grow communities. The fediverse is not in the restrictive limiting of communities time in its evolution. The fediverse is in the we need more numbers phase. You need a lot more people to be worried about this kind of thing. Right now you just need more people making more post and making more comments.
Yes. We don’t need even more fragmentation on the fediverse.
Yes; it makes no sense to have multiple communities when the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are so similar to the Steam Deck. It may be that in the future it makes sense to split out topics if their isn’t overlap, but I’d say the community isn’t flooded with content and there is a lot of overlap between these topics that will benefit everyone.
yes
Definitely yes, they all run Steam OS and all 3 device are very interchangeable in what they offer. Plus there’s not that much people to properly support 3 different communities.
Yes, Assuming that renaming a community without creating a new one isn’t possible.
The best way would be to just rename to “steamhardware”, but losing everyone in the process is certainly not worth the rename for clarity.
Excuse me, did you just blatantly ignore the possibility of ‘Steamware’??
I like the idea of having a single place where Valve’s hardware can be discussed, but the current name will make discoverability of such a community difficult. If the name cannot be changed, then I’d rec just leaving this one for only steam decks.
This is where my opinion currently lies. On one hand, the fediverse (and this community) is so small that having discussion for the whole Steam hardware ecosystem in one place makes sense. On the other hand, the name of this community is “Steam Deck”. The point of this community should be discussion about the Steam Deck. I wouldn’t want people posting unrelated news and help requests here.
I think the only way to change the name of the community is by setting a display name, but I do not think that would be sufficient for this purpose. I think the best route of action would be to create a new community called /c/SteamHardware or something. Or just use one of the multiple existing /c/Steam communities.
I think a name change would have to match. Steam hardware seems pretty straight forward to me.
I wouldn’t be opposed. New community name could be SteamHardware. They share an OS and ecosystem and people interested in one would likely be interested in the others.
I think that there is a somewhat decent chance that there will be an ARM Steam Deck Mini at some point. The Steam Client will probably be released for ARM distributions. I think for the foreseeable future there will be a considerable overlap of topics between thee devices.
I think should there be a flood of posts regarding hardware tinkering of the other devices (people sharing faceplate STLs for Machine or addons for the Frame’s expansion port), they could be directed to dedicated communities but for now IMO it’s fine to be inclusive.
I think that there is a somewhat decent chance that there will be an ARM Steam Deck Mini at some point.
Damn. I hope so. I play many indie retro style games, and my favorites are all on my Steam account. I would get so much use out of a truly pocket device with good retro controls and my Steam account signed in.
Edit: Alternately, somebody needs to release a dedicated pocket device with “Donut Dodo” pre-installed, and we can call it good enough for an few months.
