Those admins are unpaid?

Managing a store it’s a LOT of work. And you are doing to provide profit for other people. Who is going to do it for free?

It’s not like social media where people may volunteer to admin and mod, and users may donate because it’s a common goal of share information, opinions, knowledge, funny stuff etc.

Here we are talking about bussiness that do what they do because they want money. I would not volunteer to admin a store so shop owners could earn money, that’s for sure.

And I still not see the advantage of doing within the ActivityPub instead of just being a normal service where all interested shops could join.

In this example instances are stores, stores are users in instances? How stores are protected to be defederated by competitors (we are talking about money and making a living here).

What it adds to just a simple centralized service that any store can join. If you don’t want it to be another amazon, make that service a coop. or some kinds of non-profit that it’s paid by the stores that want to become part of that.

I think here we are in the classic conundrum of “a solution in search of a problem”.

Fediverse and ActivityPub is cool, but it’s a social media thing. And decentralization is cool when needed, for instance social media. But it doesn’t have to make sense for every use case.

For what’s being proposed there’s zero actual need for decentralization or ActivityPub.

I really don’t see the appeal of activity-pub for this.

It’s a protocol used for social media and interactions. You describe just sort of a “metastore”.

Maybe a review store site could work better with activity pub.

Correct me if I’m wrong. But you examples are bot cutting off the middle man.

The person with the small computer store is still a middle man.

And being smaller usually means that their cut needs to be bigger to maintain themselves.

When half the posts in your feed are “X instance bad” people get just tired and go out.

It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don’t like. It’s ridiculous.

Threads tried and failed to do that with mastodon. I think the fediverse is well thought to prevent that even by big actors.

When have that happened? Within the fediverse?

The thing about the fediverse is that it’s incredibly easy to make an instance and they are all compatible. So if any instance becomes evil people just have to seamlessly move away.

It’s not like twitter where if the owner become evil there’s nothing to do. Here you just move instance and be done with it, still the same platform, still the same users.

I kind of disagree. In the sense that people have multiple interests and identities.

If you are a french person who likes anime and technology. Where so you sign up, to the French instance, the anime one, the one focused on technology? You have to make and maintain one account for every interest you have?

I think instances should be bland an irrelevant. Like email addresses. They should say nothing about the users of that instance. Imho, the goal should be that people just sign in in the most convenient instance and should not have to think again in which instance they are.

It’s not an issue. As long as .social is able to maintain the load.

The good thing about decentralization is that at any moment anyone could open a new instance and it would work perfectly fine. It does not matter if one instance have more or less users.

If it lowers the entry barrier it is welcome. It should not matter at all.