I don’t see an issue with large instances. I value having a bunch of different options, and we do have a bunch of different options.
Having 7 disproportionately giant instances all centralised under the same oppressive corporation is not “a bunch of different options”. More than half the threadiverse is controlled by a single corporate power-abusing gatekeeper. The greed of the people farming ensures you have fewer options because it makes ghost towns out of instances that could have been great. Many good themed instances never got traction and pulled the plug. For example:
community.xmpp.net ← was a whole instance dedicated to XMPP discussion
links.esq.social ← was a whole instance dedicated to discussions about law
nano.garden ← was a whole instance dedicated to discussions about nano cryptocurrency
lemmy.globe.pub ← was a whole instance dedicated to discussions about travel
wayfarershaven.eu ← not sure if they were themed on travel or general purpose
These are great options that we lost because of foolish over-crowding on general purpose giants. If you put a McDonalds on every single street corner, that’s a lot of real estate that cannot be used by more creative restaraunts. Imagine if McDonalds was general, and had a huge menu (Chinese food, Mexican, Italian, French, Indian, etc). And there are no Indian or French restaurants in town but the McDs on every street corner has Indian and French cuisine. Are you happy with your options?
Alternatively, what about Amazon?
Do you think the amazon.com store gives you lots of options? I boycott Amazon because the way I see it Amazon destroys options by driving businesses out of business and thwarting the emergence of competitors. Some items are not even carried in local shops anymore. The shop staff will say “we don’t carry that anymore, check Amazon”. I can no longer find somewhat obscure goods locally.
General purpose nodes is not great from an organizational standpoint. We have ~15+ “privacy” communities because every general purpose node created one. Are there 15 significantly different rule sets that makes it sensible to have that much division?
Running an instance yourself requires a fair amount of work
Your choices are:
① self host
② use a decentralised host in the free world
③ use a centralised host in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden
Nixing ① does not imply ③.
If anything, on the subject of control, I like the model of social.coop over on mastodon where users can vote on direction and volunteer.
That is meaningless with Cloudflare nodes, because no one can vote to make Cloudflare inclusive. Suppose 100% of voters say CGNAT users should get access. There is no way to force Cloudflare to change their policy.