Back in the day the best way to find cool sites when you were on a cool site was to click next in the webring. In this age of ailing search engines and confidently incorrect AI, it is time for the webring to make a comeback.
This person has given his the code to get started: Webring
I don’t know, but it could be interesting to try. I could easily imagine topic-focussed servers that go into more depth on specific topics. Perhaps you would only federate things that are at a high level, or directly linked. Kinda like a wiki, but with each community doing it’s own decentralised curation and moderation…
I haven’t seen any spam on Lemmy yet, and only a tiny amount on mastodon (I’m much more active there).