Comment on flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks agothe explicit design goal
IMO, it’s a bad goal. Not that decentralized is a bad goal, but dictating the amount of decentralization will decimate wide adoption.
A server for every community is also a Mastodon goal that never really happened. Sure there are some out there, but the general public doesn’t want that. It’s a waste of compute resources to run a 24x7 server for every community. It’s a problem of scale. I get the decentralized point, but I think it’s going to utterly fail at widespread adotion if it needs a technical caretaker and a $20 a month bill evey time a zipcode wants to sell things. It migth work well in Germany, it’s not going to work well in most places.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
The general population is used to facebook and can’t even imagine an different alternative, and just copying facebook is pointless as you just end up with another Facebook with the same bad incentives for the people running it.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I didn’t say copy facebook
I’m not saying don’t decentralize at all
Forcing people to decentralize it’s going to work in most places.
I’m not spending any more time on the subject, I think we’re at an impassse and neither of us are going to change our minds.
Honestly, it’s a great project though,
best of luck
Zorque@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If only there were some kind of middle ground… sadly only extremes exist 😔
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Well, this is a more philosophical question, but it is a result of misaligned incentives and not because someone is having some evil master-plan. Most of today’s Facebook like sites didn’t start out as evil empires, they became so basically by necessity once they chose a certain trajectory. The only way to prevent that is to have strong defense mechanisms in place from the very beginning and that then can easily appear as the other extreme.
Zorque@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But only accepting one possible alternative is an extreme. You can build in safeguards… but if they’re too rigorous you will drive away potential users. Much like with freedom and security, you need to middle ground between accessibility and defensibility.