JustEnoughDucks

In Belgium we have 2dehands. Not perfect or open source but miles better than Facebook marketplace.

No payments go through the platform. People meet in person and use cash or use a bank transfer or 3rd party payment like payconiq to buy and sell things. It works perfectly.

Not everything has to have an integrated shopify style payment platform. Most of the population is perfectly capable of exchanging money.

I saw it just yesterday.

And a week ago.

And a month ago.

And I had it myself 2 months ago, fixed by going to the online element client that just happened to still be “verified” after a while of no use and then I could verify the rest of my clients. I would be SoL if I didn’t have one of my original sessions upon making the account years ago still. Interesting system.

That was in the 1 encrypted chat I am a part of.

99% of rooms aren’t encrypted so are completely and totally insecure anyway. Which I guess is fine for community discussion spaces.

I like fluffychat but it doesn’t have threading. Element is also fine and what I have to use on desktop because neochat fucks up so much, but I can’t use it on my phone because it causes an extra 1%/hour drain on my phone battery in the background which is insane. Uninstalled it a year or two ago.

Discovery? Interesting thought.

I tried out pixelfed and the pixelix app for the past couple weeks.

The “discovery” page on the official app is worse than useless. It shows almost nobody with over 10 followers, highlighting one person with 50-100 followers, then shows “popular on the fediverse” which are thumbnails of posts of the people it just recommended. It always recommends at least 5 of the same people day after day, week after week, even people you already follow.

The official app can’t even show a global feed so it is literally impossible to discover new people unless you know their name and specifically search for them, or they are recommended by luck on the discover page (of which there are multiple repeats per day, so not likely)

Pixelix at least allows you to view a global feed though. Definitely a better experience, but Lemmy discovery is not any worse than that.

I am using the app. I sent a message to Stix the admin of the instance and magically a few hours later I was able to see everything (but no response). I wonder if there is a timed lockout or simply a soft ban to prevent spam on that instance. I also verified that discover indeed linked to other instances, but the results were still all but useless.

However, there is still no way I can find to switch to or even view the global feed on the app, but I can do that on the web browser app easily. Is there a setting that I am missing or so? It is very straightforward on every mastodon and lemmy app…

Gram.social

To me, the entire idea behind federation is that, like mastodon and Lemmy, you can see everything in the space, not just what is on your own server, especially by default or extremely upfront and clear way to make the behavior like that. That is the entire thing people are afraid of when they have to choose a server which leads to centralization or people simply leaving.

I mean I also don’t get any of the hashtags I follow on my feed. Only the 5 accounts they forced me to follow by default.

It’s hard for me to believe the number of 44k monthly active users and yet the “most popular accounts” that I can see on discover have 45 followers and there is virtually no activity outside of a few photographers that imported their Instagram account.

Interesting because i just joined 1 day ago so my feed only has 5 default following, but discover only has about 5 other peoples’ work repeated through the discover tab. It seems difficult to discover new people which could be a problem in retaining normal people after the ibflux, like what happened to lemmy

My girlfriend runs a kid-friendly café for younger moms and sadly it would probably tank her business moving over to pixelfed… It’s quite a big risk for those kind of small businesses…

It will die when there is an alternative app that competes with marketplace. That + messenger keep most people there. Signal (or whatsapp which while meta, isn’t tied to fb account)'already can replace messenger.

That is simply the truth. Here is Belgium we have an app called 2dehands which is very prolific and have a way better interface and experience than marketplace (even though it is nowhere near perfect or great).

Marketplace is definitely completely secondary to 2dehands in the Flemish part. Brussels still uses marketplace a lot, but literally all marketplace needs in order to slowly die off is competition but the 2nd hand market is not a lucrative app space with no real funding opportunities outside of data sale so nobody does it.