Maybe someday it will be something different, but right now it's a lot like Gab's attempt at a marketplace - it's focused on individual businesses rather than individual products.
If you think about this distinction, it's the difference between Amazon or ebay and a yellow pages phone book.
In other words, I typically know what I need, and I need a site to find a vendor to provide it.
By basing the site on the business, I have to guess at an appropriate category, and just start randomly querying businesses or their web sites in that category to see if they might actually have the product I'm looking for. Rinse and repeat for every product I need.
Since most of the businesses there appear to either be original/crafty products, rebranded bulk products, or fragrance/clothing/crap, it makes it useful to a very limited sector of online customers.
I appreciate that PublicSquare is an alternative, but it's not a viable one unfortunately, at least for me. Almost everything on there is crap we're trying to eliminate from our lives, not things we need and even if there is something I need there, I'll be damned if I can find it.
So I just joined.
Maybe someday it will be something different, but right now it's a lot like Gab's attempt at a marketplace - it's focused on individual businesses rather than individual products.
If you think about this distinction, it's the difference between Amazon or ebay and a yellow pages phone book.
In other words, I typically know what I need, and I need a site to find a vendor to provide it.
By basing the site on the business, I have to guess at an appropriate category, and just start randomly querying businesses or their web sites in that category to see if they might actually have the product I'm looking for. Rinse and repeat for every product I need.
Since most of the businesses there appear to either be original/crafty products, rebranded bulk products, or fragrance/clothing/crap, it makes it useful to a very limited sector of online customers.
I appreciate that PublicSquare is an alternative, but it's not a viable one unfortunately, at least for me. Almost everything on there is crap we're trying to eliminate from our lives, not things we need and even if there is something I need there, I'll be damned if I can find it.
YMMV.
Followup: I reached out to PublicSq. They do have plans to expand into being an e-commerce platform in 2023.
https://publicsqblog.com/where-were-going-in-2023/
What that specifically means and whether or not they'll keep to that are open questions. It is, however, encouraging.
Perhaps we'll eventually get an option other than the current woke/incompetent providers.