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?
