@mayel
I agree! "Critical Mass" means what, the market share momentum needed to dominate and destroy/absorb competition? It doesn't seem congruent with federation's purpose, let alone necessary.
@arteteco

@erosdiscordia
What, why would you think that? What I meant is that, it not having that many users, I see no real urge to decentralize the software.
@mayel

@arteteco

What I mean is that being centralized is actually makes it more challenging to have enough users. Better being part of a network like the fediverse.

@erosdiscordia

@arteteco
Hey, I'm sorry, I wasn't attacking the project you originally shared (which sounds cool). I was more generally criticizing the pressures that get put on app makers, that market dominance or buyout are the golden directions to aim.

Of course an app needs a certain critical mass of users before it can really federate. But what do you think would be a good size? And how to resist pressures to default to being a silo? Just some thoughts.
@mayel

@erosdiscordia

No worries. It is a rather good question, right now I'd say that a critical mass is when the platform does what it should well. If it's a wiki, means that the quality and quantity of the pages increase, with a hospitality exchange maybe that you usually find a host without too much of an effort?

It doesn't usually happen atm (also because of the choice of making it invite only, which on the other hand has kept the quality high).

Maybe a federated approach could increase that mass? I'd be curious to see it, even though I wouldn't put it in my top 5 application I'd like to see federated =D

I'd be afraid of moderation, quite. When you sleep in someone else's place you want the platform to be quite controlled, especially for young women who oftentimes have bad experiences on couchsurfing. With the fediverse moderation is difficult and has its challenges (I'm a mod, I've faced a few).

@mayel

@mayel
What do you mean? TR is not really in competition, not market-wise at least, being not for profit, donation based and open source, is just a community of travellers. It's not like federating is perfect for any use case, not saying this won't work, but it seems to me that it would require some more deep and technical consideration first.

Anyway, just start your project, no one is stopping anybody

@arteteco

Sorry if my posts seem confrontational to you. I'm not critising Trustroots, just arguing for the benefits of interoperability and decentralisation, which can benefit users in different and wonderful ways. (Being free, open source, non-profit, etc is awesome, but can still carry the challenges of centralized governance, sustainability, and "marketing").

@mayel
No worries, I see your point of view and I don't disagree, after all we are on the fediverse, we both must like decentralization :)
I'm not that sure whether a federated software for hospitality exchange would work better at the moment, but I'd love to find out alright. If someone would start working on something like that I'll back him/her up, sure thing.

@arteteco
As a quick sidebar, does anyone know if there are any platform cooperative frameworks for the fediverse like the software developed by #Sharetribe? I've been thinking it would be cool to have a co-op for #Etsy type stuff, and maybe this would be a good way to implement it. #OpenBazaar seems a little too crypto-heavy unless it's changed a lot since last time I looked at it.
@mayel #cooperative #coop #plarformcooperative #crypto

@solarpunkgnome
Afaik this is more or less what the people at commonspub are doing, a general purpose AP server which should make it easy to implement anything on top ( https://commonspub.org/ )

@mayel is one of the devs so could tell us more, right?
This, of course, if I got your question right in the first place :D

@arteteco
Not sure if that's exactly what I'm looking for, but it's along the right direction. I'll have to look into it further to know for sure. Thanks!
@mayel

@arteteco

Yes, this is what we're trying to do :)

@solarpunkgnome