• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Interesting to learn about this company, the different storea, and different ‘front facing storefronts’ ideas soubd on the face of it to be similar to the OP’s idea.

    [I only read the wikipedia for my response] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten).

    But a read through the criticisms section and the example of the negative systemic influence of centralised power are numerous.

    The examples where the systemic centralised structure of the company influenced the pathway are,

    • the Corporate Culture section the ‘Englishionisation’,

    • disabling product reviews. This was a product specific case, but it highlights the fact they can take this action sitewide at any time, with little to no recourse.

    • Price Hiking, with up to 18 Rakuten employees having been revealed to have promoted the idea with vendors. If your online marketplace is telling you to do something on price, the pressure for an individual business is great because you are then vulnerable to them making decisions against you with very little you as a vendor can do to respond.

    With these few examples from their wikipedia page the negative and at times malign effects of a centralised platform are revealed in the same way the same exercise for Amazon would reveal the same systemic consequences. With the system OP is advocating the onlibe marketplace would be unable through its own structure to implement these pressures on vendors operating on the network. This systemic difference would make it better for vendors, and customers alike, however harder (but not impossible) for a commercial operation that maintains the network to exist. I’d look tobthe Mcdonalds’ Harry Sonneborn owning real estate example of how you can use unique adjacent business structures to build a viable business while not undermining it’s core selling point.




  • I started posting by picking the communuty for the place i live and trying to post local and independent media and special interest groups articles about/in the context of that place.

    Its benefits are,

    • It creates activity on the fediverse that is unique, and the more interesting for it.
    • You’ll be promoting the voices of those less often heard.
    • You can also help local and independent media with readers and exposure. Its seen as more of an offline problem of media concentration, but i think theres online solutions for the surviving publications.

    If you look through my history you’ll see my posts to c/Perth/WesternAustralia there are ebbs and flows in interest but the key point is when something happens, say a protest, or a pub banning some nazis the community is there ready for the users, active and established.

    If you go to the sidebar of that community, and all the communities i moderate i have gathered in each a host of resources for people to refer to for articles and information in regards each of those communities. It also helps me to have easy access to those publishers as i look for something i find interesting.

    So i don’t know what city or State you live in, but if theres a place based server, or a generalist server that hosts a community for it, i’d start posting there. If it looks abandoned maybe jump onto that servers c/meta and request to become the moderator. That’ll give you the ability to change things like the sidebar and participate in managing misbehaviour if/when users post things off topic/against the rules for the community.

    See you in fediverse ;)

    Edit: oh, also posting is a piece of active fun, instead of waiting passivley for something to entertain you. So its fun in a different way to scrolling feeds, or commenting.















  • Lot of good advice here about curation, thats definitely an option to leverage your subscribed feed.

    Another option, is to remove yourself from the largest server (lemmy world), look at your options on other instances, theres hundreds. The label to the right of usernames should denote what instance people are connecting from.

    Some examples are blahaj, midwest.social, sopuli, feddit…

    The links below have lists of a lot of the available instances,

    Lemmyverse.net

    Fedidb

    Advantages of Choosing a Smaller Server

    The experience of the ‘Local’ tab seems to be genuinely different from Lemmy World.

    Lemmy World probably doesn’t look too different whether you sort by the ‘all’ tab or ‘local’ tab, so you really only have the ‘subscribe’ tab to find and hone your niche on the network.

    Going for a smaller, but active in its own right, instance means you suddenly have a ‘local’ tab that is highly differentiated from the wider lemmy network, andgoing along with that its often a bit less political.

    I’d use my own as an example here, but we’ve just had a major election in Australia, so its been pretty political lately, i’m expecting that to subside now that the chooks are counted.