One quite annoying Lemmy behaviour is when you search for a community that has many results spanning multiple screens (e.g. query “software”), the list is largely clusterfucked with crappy centralised instances that go against the #fedi philosophy (e.g. #lemmyWorld, #ShItjustWorks, #lemmyCa, #LemmEE, #LemmyZip, #programmingDev, etc).
I discovered a fix: ctrl-rt-click on every community in the list to open each in a tab. Then click “block community”, then repeat the search. It works the way it should: blocked communities are excluded from search results.
Wish I realised that sooner… would have saved me some effort and frustration in trying to search only for communities in the decentralised free world.
Why are those instances creepy and how do they go against fedi philosophy?
They are centralised in the walled garden of Cloudflare. Access to all those instances is dictated by a gatekeeping tech giant in the US who excludes several demographics of people. Lemmy World and some of the others are also centralised by disproportionate size, which is enabled by Cloudflare with no sense of self control on growth.
Ethical users who are informed about Cloudflare avoid those centralised instances. The purpose of the fedi is to balance power. Those instances represent an attack on that principle. In principle it’s not much different than doing a community search and getting half a screen full of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn links.