I’m not sure what you mean by constitution. Are you talking about a mission statement or statement of values?

These are some dictionary defs:

• a set of basic laws or principles for a country that describe the rights and duties of its citizens and the way in which it is governed
• a set of basic rules and principles for an organization that control how it operates
• your general physical condition, health, and strength
• the form or structure of something, or the way in which it is organized

In business when a company is created (constituted) by someone, they create a company constitution which declares how the business will operate and what its trade is. If you’re in the plumbing business, you would say your company is for profit and you would list the activities of plumbing and maybe selling plumbing supplies. Your company is then legally bound by that constitution. You would (e.g.) be allowed to buy sulfuric acid because plumbers have a legit use for that. But you could not use that company to go into the PC repair business, at least not without changing the company constitution. And if you update the company constitution to be a PC repair business, you would no longer be able to buy sulfuric acid. These concepts may be state-specific. When a small shop is selling a bizarre unrelated mix of things, it likely means something is dodgy with their constitution.. what business did they say they were in? The corporate constitution mechanism is somewhat supposed to mitigate shops selling sex toys, car parts, and pizzas all in the same place. It’s not always well enforced in my area.

Most people are aware of gov constitutions so I won’t go into that.. it essentially encapsulates an abstraction of the highest values of the land and gives direction and purpose.

There is also personal constitution. That is, if a person has a strong moral constitution they not only have values but they adhere to them. Vegans would be an example of those with a strong constitution (to the extent they strictly practice the vegan lifestyle).

I’m using the term loosely in the threadiverse sense. Perhaps along the lines of the 4th bullet. I intend for a node with a constitution to mean that the node owner has declared a purpose. It could be topic-focused, or region focused, or culture focused, or a way of thinking, a theme, etc.. some kind of comprehensible direction. But what we see are mostly nodes listed in the lemmyverse.net catalog with no specific purpose or structure.. just “general purpose” yet small at the same time.

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.

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?