• 5 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 11th, 2025

help-circle





  • Not a bad idea for small businesses - having a central place to purchase direct from retailers is a nice idea, I think where it may struggle is:

    Verifying seller authenticity / avoiding scam products

    • In a fully open marketplace its hard to enforce accountability. Amazon has teams of people removing fraud items (and they still have rampant fraud).
    • Amazon functions as an insurer on sales - if you receive a fraudulent item, amazon eats the cost (and tries to cover it from the seller)

    Part of Amazon’s market dominance and convenience is owning the logistics

    • Amazon operates massive warehouses and has tons of money invested in logistics, so orders can be consolidated
    • All of the savings of not paying the “Amazon tax” will just become the FedEx/UPS tax

    This is not to say it can’t be done but Amazon has billions of dollars of infrastructure that’s hard to replace with volunteer programming
















  • The article does a good job breaking it down, but a short example is if you want to post about technology, you have to choose one of those communities to post to.

    You can cross post or repost in the other communities but then any discussion gets fragmented, people see the same thing multiple times in their feed, only engage with one, and likely not the same one as somebody else.

    On the other hand only posting in one community could significantly reduce engagement if you choose poorly.



  • Proposed solution 3: Communities following communities

    The ability for communities to “subscribe” to other communities is an idea that comes from this Github comment. This is, in my opinion, the best proposed solution by far. Community a can follow community b, making posts from b also appear on a.

    What this means is that community moderators can choose to have posts from other communities to show up on theirs. That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on pancake@a.com and it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!

    The main proposed solution doesn’t force merging on anyone. Mods can decide whether or not they want content from other communities to show up in their space. No two news instances have to merge if they serve different audiences.

    It isn’t explicitly called out in the proposal but I could easily see there being an option for mods to unlink individual posts from other communities if they get too spicy.


  • To answer part of your question: Cyberpunk is a pretty good game for just wandering around aimlessly, but because of the balance, from my recollection, you can’t really just steal planes and blow everything up. You can make some fun builds to tear through enemies, and the world is gorgeous to drive around in, but there are some limits on your ability to cause total mass destruction.


  • Steam was the first major storefront to refuse to carry Horses, a first-person psychological horror adventure about “the burden of familial trauma and puritan values, the dynamics of totalitarian power, and the ethics of personal responsibility” set on a ranch where nude human beings in horse masks are treated as livestock.

    Publisher Santa Ragione said in November that Valve declined to carry Horses because it contained “content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.” Santa Ragione disputed that characterization, but an appeal was rejected and the ban stands.

    Seems like it’s treading a very fine line…