Do any beautiful & clever techie ppl on here see any path for creating a decentralized Lyft/Uber competitor? They just feel so predatory toward drivers.. something to give power back to the drivers would be cool.
@mike Right? Mastodon kind of makes me feel a good route for circumventing giant abusive companies is just to decentralize, like, everything.
I guess that’s the idea behind shopping local. Hah
@mike another one is video hosting. YouTube is a powerhouse of resource for folx wanting to learn on their own time, but the way they compensate content creators is flaky and inconsistent. they demonetize videos for weak reasons to get out of paying people, and it really hurts the creators
TRASH🌟
@jezzy @mike the immediate concern would be how to implement an effective abuse prevention policy (i mean, that's an issue with the fediverse too, but safety is a little more immediate when you're getting into a stranger's car) but yeah all the technology exists to build a federated rideshare system
@chillgamesh @jezzy @mike Humm, I can think of several major problems that would need solutions. Abuse prevention is one. Payment, conflict arbitration, trust building, etc.
Fare setting is possibly the hardest. If such a platform is a true market, then there will always be some driver trying to get an edge by undercutting, and fares will race to the bottom again.
@shannon @chillgamesh @jezzy @mike (using terminology from how mastodon works) I wonder if selective federating and defederating would be a big boon in setting fares. Like if there were instances that only federated with other instances that met certain minimum fare requirements and maybe even required each driver to publish their rates a few weeks out so there wouldn't be realtime lowballing.
@valerieinfinty @shannon @chillgamesh @mike
Maybe this combined with some system for tracking reputation/rating of the instance? Each instance would have decent incentive to maintain their community.
@jezzy I don't know about decentralized. There have been a few co-ops/platform co-ops, but they're all based in specific localities and none have really taken off.
@jezzy
I don't remember the relevant names or half the details, unfortunately, but something does exist.
I think the messaging programme is sorta fediverse-like in terms of you can get an instant messaging app and then you pick like... "groups" like instances to join or smth and one of those was a rideshare thing where the driver and passenger would negotiate travel and fares directly first, and then pay in cash.
Think it was most used in russia and india or smth.
@jezzy
Sorry i really don't remember anything about it very well!
@jezzy I would immediately use this instead of Uber and Lyft.