Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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amazons true strength is ultimately in their logistics. Amazon itself isn’t a bad idea in theory but the execution is poor because of cutthroat capitalism exploiting workers and privatization. Ultimately the idea of sellers being able to ship their goods to communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized. The marketplace can be federated, sure
Another point here, Amazon has really thin profit margins on their core business (not counting AWS, etc. Just the online shopping). If it weren't absolutely gargantuan, it would fail. It's only profitable because of the logistical efficiency it has achieved, exploitation (of workers, cheap goods from China, etc.), and absolutely massive economies of scale. Similar to Walmart.
Recommended reading: People's Republic of Walmart.
All for nationalizing - would be better for everyone. -
you are not proposing a federated amazon, this is just federated ads and/or reviews.
how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
please you can't just make anything federated. this protocol is built for social media and struggles to take over that sphere, we should focus on one thing rather than throwing random stuff at the wall hoping it sticks (cough federated tik tok cough)
God, if only someone had invented an internet-native form of money in 2008
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I mean, if their content was signed you could verify the authenticity of the certificate. Usually the business name appears in the cert.
No I mean, I don't "trust" a groceries store. I only use them to trade for groceries, and only use cash when doing so.
Just because I use someone doesn't mean I trust them. Even more: just becaue I trust Alice, that doesn't mean I trust Bob by transitivity.
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I know that Federation is exciting, but all these ideas for federated services are really missing the reason why the Fediverse's current bits are successful - because they have low moral hazard.
When you get into economics and meatspace relationships, moral hazard skyrockets.
What is "meatspace"
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What is "meatspace"
Real life. The offline world. Grassville.
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Shilling your bags as usual. Crypto-scammers are all so predictable.
Why in god's name do you need monero to buy groceries or even computer parts?
They're also transphobic and where whinging on one post about being censored
Apparently consequences for being a bigot is censorship for them
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I love the idea of federate Amazon. The obvious choice would be to implement Monero as the "reserve currency" integrate with decentralise xmr exchanges and escrow services. U would do some sort of seller raring from consumers giving reviews tied to a purchase transaction on the blockchain.
Also imagine the possibilities if for services could federate (most likely only with eachother). If this gets built it will be the final form of the free market. No borders no laws no restrictions no censorship no taxes. It would be chaos. The end of wall street as we know it, and from its ashes shall rise a libertarian phoenix.
OK Crypto Scammer
Also, FUCK TRANSPHOBES
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Hi folks!
I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).
Example 1:
So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.Example 2:
So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!
Have a nice weekend.
Or you can just buy from other online retailers.
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Hi folks!
I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).
Example 1:
So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.Example 2:
So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!
Have a nice weekend.
I think there's some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.
AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon's real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.
What you're proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that's hard to achieve without some centralized control.
There's also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.
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Hi folks!
I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).
Example 1:
So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.Example 2:
So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!
Have a nice weekend.
Ideas are cheap. This is the third post like this I've seen in two weeks. Build it.
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I think there's some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.
AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon's real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.
What you're proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that's hard to achieve without some centralized control.
There's also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.
Thats entirely possible. Thanks for pointing it out.
But the rest about amazon is (interesting?) noise in my opinion. The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else. Sellers need to sell there to survive and customers cant find alternatives, especially not for a competitive price.
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Or you can just buy from other online retailers.
except you cant. not in most real life situations. I personally made it a habbit to not shop at amazon and the time and money I "waste" for shopping elsewhere is insane. If you come with "you're just bad at searching then" I will block you without comment.
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amazons true strength is ultimately in their logistics. Amazon itself isn’t a bad idea in theory but the execution is poor because of cutthroat capitalism exploiting workers and privatization. Ultimately the idea of sellers being able to ship their goods to communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized. The marketplace can be federated, sure
That is a very constructive idea! Thanks. The warehouses can also be collectively bought/built imho but I'm not totally opposed to state owned. Everything is better than techno feudalist owned.
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I really like the idea of a grassroots Amazon competitor. That said,
You need to have a high level of trust. A federated network of shady scams that just take your money and send you nothing half the time is not going to fly. Is there a vetting process, who controls that process, how's all that work. If its 'good seller' reviews, how are those stats protected from manipulation.
You need to have extreme ease of use. UI barriers that seem trivial to developers can sink a platform.
If there are problems solvable by centralization, maybe that could be done as a cooperative organization which devs and vendors can join and run democratically.
Thank you for participating in this discussion. Happy to hear someone thought about this.
The high level of trust is important, yes. My idea is to either plain use or build something similar to the fediseer. I'm an instance admin and I use fediseer for trust management. This means that instances can trust other instances (manually!) and are responsible if these instances turn out bad. That means if you have a friend you know personally and trust, you would recommend them to the fediseer. this friend in turn would recommend another friend and so on. that is a chain of trust. so far this works wonderful.
Some things could also be solved by building communities or unions like normal companies do. But of course this should be limited to federating companies.
Thanks for asking questions. It helps me think.
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No I mean, I don't "trust" a groceries store. I only use them to trade for groceries, and only use cash when doing so.
Just because I use someone doesn't mean I trust them. Even more: just becaue I trust Alice, that doesn't mean I trust Bob by transitivity.
in that case you might be part of the problem atm. of course, if you buy groceries, you trust the grocery store to not sell you poisoned stuff. and if your friend asks you where to buy groceries, you recommend those you have good experiences with.
That said, trust is on its way out in our society but that is a political problem, not a technical. i can solve technical problems.
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So online farmers/flea market?
that is online farmers and flea market? feel free to post a link
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Closest we've got right now is Flohmarkt, right? If they haven't already been working on some kinda trust system, they're probably taking code contributions. I saw somewhere else somebody suggested Loops integration for it, so they could have something like the tiktok shop. I mean capitalism is garbage, but unfortunately we do currently gotta buy stuff occasionally, and it would be nice if that experience sucked less.
Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new. I'll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop. because my point also is to make people independent from each other so that no single entity can control them. in this case I mean if flohmarkt got "outlawed" for example because lobbyists and such, websites would prevail, i hope.
Thanks for participating.
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Hi folks!
I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).
Example 1:
So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.Example 2:
So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!
Have a nice weekend.
This is surprisingly one of the few actual useful uses of blockchain. Business tried to shove it in everywhere and it didn't make sense because blockchain is a way to audit federated separate instances - which businesses are not. They're a single monolithic structure, and they don't need the trust - they already have it. They're themselves, they just have to trust their own internal teams.
We, on the otherhand, are the perfect use for it. A way to say X person paid Y person for this product on this day at this time, X person now has the authority to rate Y person for how they did. Immutable, impossible to fake.
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you are not proposing a federated amazon, this is just federated ads and/or reviews.
how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
please you can't just make anything federated. this protocol is built for social media and struggles to take over that sphere, we should focus on one thing rather than throwing random stuff at the wall hoping it sticks (cough federated tik tok cough)
Wow. Took a while to get a naysayer in here.
Sorry mate, I can do whatever I like. You should visit a hackspace at some point. You would be shocked how many people there give a crap about what you think they can do.
But on a more productive note:
I have not thought out the whole process yet. Otherwise I would not ask here but show a product. There are ways to work payments for open source already. Payments are limited to credit cards, bank transfer, crypto, paypal, stripe, etc as far as I know. So I would suggest the "main shop", that the customer orders in, would be the one booking and sending the other funds to the other shops the customer ordered in. The delivery would be standard dropshipping (the buy order goes to the other shop and they are responsible for delivery, same as amazon does for many shops now). Contestations is a good point. They would also need to be delivered to the dropshipped company and the payment contested as well. From my current pov this sounds entirely doable.
So if you just drop that condescending tone you can see we actually can be productive here. Do you have any more points we can work through?
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This is surprisingly one of the few actual useful uses of blockchain. Business tried to shove it in everywhere and it didn't make sense because blockchain is a way to audit federated separate instances - which businesses are not. They're a single monolithic structure, and they don't need the trust - they already have it. They're themselves, they just have to trust their own internal teams.
We, on the otherhand, are the perfect use for it. A way to say X person paid Y person for this product on this day at this time, X person now has the authority to rate Y person for how they did. Immutable, impossible to fake.
I'm definitely intrigued. I have HUGE prejudices when it comes to blockchain, one being climate impact. The other being privacy of all things. But I can see it as an option.
