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.
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.