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.
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.