Most nodes have no constitution
In an effort to find places to create communities, I browse lemmyverse.net. There are hundreds of instances. Unfortunately descriptions of instances are either empty or general purpose.
This is a terrible organization. No constitution. It’s like these neighborhoods where all the shops try to sell a bit of everything. E.g. like when a tiny shop sells spices, phones, cheese, hammers, rugs, and speakers. Nothing goes together. We say shops like that lack a constitution which defines the focus of their business. When there’s a whole street of shops like this, you don’t know which shop to enter for what you need. You have to try many different shops arbitrarily until you find what you need. The #threadiverse is like that. Not many venues focused on a defined purpose.
Have I missed something? Is there a service or document that only lists specific-purpose #Lemmy and #Kbin nodes?
Centralization in wolf’s clothes
The other problem with the Lemmyverse site is there is no “cancel Cloudflare” switch that supports filtering out all instances that are centralized on Cloudflare. I always have to open the filters and manually remove:
- lemmy·world
- lemm·ee
- sh·itjust·works
- lemmy·ca
- lemmy·ml (← no longer CF but I still filter it out for other reasons)
The threadiverse exists inherently for the purpose of decentralization. So it’d be sensible for resources for finding nodes to make it trivial to just list decentralized instances.
Centralization - lack of constitution relationship
The lack of constitution effectively exacerbates the centralization problem. That is, when everything is general purpose, this encourages everyone to choose the biggest general purpose venue – Lemmy·World, the Wal·Mart of the #Lemmyverse.
You have thousands of instances only to have a /c/games on every single one of them where they’ll all have the same GTA6 speculation thread when the GTA6 trailer inevitably drops making the same exact observations and jokes. People will naturally say, “fuck this,” and just go to the thread/instance with the most people already, which would almost certainly be the one in lemmy.world.
You make a great point with the shop analogy. But it’s not only items being sold, to continue with your analogy, but the culture and vibe of the place as well. Multiple general purpose shops can coexist if they have radically different vibes. One general purpose shop can cater towards Amish people while another can cater towards bodybuilders, and they would have radically different vibes even if the items being sold are almost exactly the same which would nudge you towards going to one shop over another. Maybe you don’t like Amish people for being weird about technology. Maybe dudes with bulging muscles weird you out.
Virtually every single Lemmy instance save for like 5 is just trying to be Reddit, basically Reddit minus spez. Seriously, if you blank out the url and everything after the @ for usernames, you wouldn’t be able to say, “this is obviously a lemmy.world thread” or “this is such a lemm.ee thread.” Outside of those 5, the only distinguishing feature would be if a thread has some chick flashing her titties or some dude getting his dick sucked, you could rule out that thread belonging to SFW instances. That’s pretty much it.
I’m not sure what you mean by constitution. Are you talking about a mission statement or statement of values?
I’m not sure what you mean by constitution. Are you talking about a mission statement or statement of values?
These are some dictionary defs:
- a set of basic laws or principles for a country that describe the rights and duties of its citizens and the way in which it is governed
- a set of basic rules and principles for an organization that control how it operates
- your general physical condition, health, and strength
- the form or structure of something, or the way in which it is organized
In business when a company is created (constituted) by someone, they create a company constitution which declares how the business will operate and what its trade is. If you’re in the plumbing business, you would say your company is for profit and you would list the activities of plumbing and maybe selling plumbing supplies. Your company is then legally bound by that constitution. You would (e.g.) be allowed to buy sulfuric acid because plumbers have a legit use for that. But you could not use that company to go into the PC repair business, at least not without changing the company constitution. And if you update the company constitution to be a PC repair business, you would no longer be able to buy sulfuric acid. These concepts may be state-specific. When a small shop is selling a bizarre unrelated mix of things, it likely means something is dodgy with their constitution… what business did they say they were in? The corporate constitution mechanism is somewhat supposed to mitigate shops selling sex toys, car parts, and pizzas all in the same place. It’s not always well enforced in my area.
Most people are aware of gov constitutions so I won’t go into that… it essentially encapsulates an abstraction of the highest values of the land and gives direction and purpose.
There is also personal constitution. That is, if a person has a strong moral constitution they not only have values but they adhere to them. Vegans would be an example of those with a strong constitution (to the extent they strictly practice the vegan lifestyle).
I’m using the term loosely in the threadiverse sense. Perhaps along the lines of the 4th bullet. I intend for a node with a constitution to mean that the node owner has declared a purpose. It could be topic-focused, or region focused, or culture focused, or a way of thinking, a theme, etc… some kind of comprehensible direction. But what we see are mostly nodes listed in the lemmyverse.net catalog with no specific purpose or structure… just “general purpose” yet small at the same time.
I’m new to this whole thing so, grain of salt and whatnot.
I like it this way? I have found several more isolated instances. They are usually hyper specific. The discussions are very helpful.
But sometimes I also want to see random shit or chuckle at a meme.
Edit: I forgot to say that blocking instances does need to be a feature that should have been implemented yesterday. I think everyone that even partially understands the fediverse can agree on that.
What I wrote is orthogonal to whether an instance is isolated. Whether it’s federated or not is a separate discussion. How you are finding the instances would be interesting though. Where did you go to find the topic-specific instances?
Mostly by searching for them. Occasionally, something pertinent to me will pop up in the feed.
You can always just start your own and then advertise across the verse. Or create a subscription list of all the instance versions of a community you’re interested in.
Sure but that’s a lot of cost and effort to just add one drop to the ocean, which does not make a significant difference on the overall problem. We can get better leverage on the problem by encouraging tens of existing instances to get a constitution. I think to some extent that can be accomplished with directory services that are designed to address the problem. Forking #LemmyExplorer may be a way to steer things in a better direction.
Consider as well the enshitification of the web (Cloudflare exclusivity, CAPTCHAs, popups, huge cookie agreement forms, trackers like FB like buttons, etc). Creating one good website does not even begin to make a dent on the problem. It has to be fixed at a higher level, like in search engines.
