I proposed a solution to both have more relaxed rules for personal profiles and have dedicated and highly regulated places for discussion. Seems like you just want to call things dumb
> admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?
You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
I called it like I see it.
Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution.
If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.
That's technically true, but who cares? The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. The communities of videogame and music enthusiasts are larger than any one instance, and can follow one another across instances, and see each others' tagged posts in searches across instances.
Defaults matter. Usability matters. If that particular filter is the one that the community uses to communicate with each other, then who's included or excluded from that filter becomes very relevant.
One can always drop by https://mastovue.glitch.me every so often to tour the local TLs of instances in the neighborhood (https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/) to see if there's anyone worth following.