Hi! This is my first post here, so | wanted to spread awareness about two bartering apps I found. One is called Zéya (I got this from an Instagram ad) and BUNZ (I found this app through looking through search engines). Both of their purposes is to be anti-marketplace apps from how they describe themselves. Where you trade one item in exchange for another. No cash is involved whatsoever.
Are they available outside of corporate marketplaces themselves? Like, f-droid doesn’t have them, not a good sign for countercapitalist stuff.
I think the reason for that is because they aren’t open source despite not collecting your data
With closed source apps, we can’t independently verify what is or is not being collected.
But another, longer-term issue, is that because they are proprietary, if they became quite popular, they would very likely be sold to either a competitor to shut it down, or enshittified by adding transaction fees.
As an older example, Paperback Swap was an incredible website where people could give away books in exchange for a credit, which could be exchanged with another user for their book. There were no fees taken by the website, the only cost was shipping the books via media mail (which was extremely affordable, as the books would be wrapped in printer paper).
Paperback Swap was, at the time, a very popular website, with over a million books available. I used the service for many years happily exchanging books.
Then it was purchased by Amazon, which saw Paperback Swap as a threat to their used book market. They immediately enshittified the app, adding transaction fees and requiring you to purchase exchange credits or ongoing subscriptions. Within a couple years the community was effectively killed, and now shambles on as a shell of its former self.
Free, Libre open-source apps are the only long-term refuge from the constant churn of enshittification, as the community can always fork it to prevent bad-actors and venture capital from corrupting it.
For those reasons, you’re likely to experience some pushback on them. We’ve been burned so many times :(
Flohmarket could potentially be an alternative, though I’m not sure if instances can be set up to be purely barter.