Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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Thanks a lot! Bummer that it is primarily for media.
I wish it had more publicity/popularity, is there any way I can help?It's not a bunker per se, it is just that, if you are a review platform, the easiest initial targets would be Goodreads, IMDb, etc. Other types of stuff to review may take a little longer. However, if you can get access to a source of unique IDs, it may be possible to import the information. As it is written in Python there will be knowledgeable folks around who can better advise on this. I'd suggest post about it here: [email protected]. See what other people think about it.
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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.
Instead of Amazon. Id do fediverse equivalent of Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Which technically exists in. Europe it just needs to be imported to the US
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Instead of Amazon. Id do fediverse equivalent of Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Which technically exists in. Europe it just needs to be imported to the US
As you said, it exists. You can just clone it from codeberg and run it. Here's an article about it https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/
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Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new.
Philosophically, the classified ad model (a bit like Etsy or eBay without auctions, where you are just an introduction service) seems more in keeping with the Fediverse and has a lot less hassles than trying to replicate Amazon with all it's storage and shipping.
I’ll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop.
What I'd like to see is more seamless integration of [email protected] into other Fediverse services.
So someone has a blog for their writing on WordPress or Ghost but can run a sidebar or footer with links to Flohmarkt where people can buy a signed copy or special edition directly. Or you have it working with [email protected] where users can read a review of a film and click through to see if anyone has a copy of the Blu-ray on Flohmarkt.
Equally, [email protected] is a kind of Facebook replacement and Flohmarkt could slot in there as a Marketplace replacement.
In general we probably need more plug-ins in Fediverse services to help integrate things more tightly and Flohmarkt seems the kind of thing that would work well when slotted into a lot of other existing services.
if flohmarkt got “outlawed” for example because lobbyists and such
That would be very difficult to do with a decentralised service.
I agree on all points except the last. It is no problem to outlaw something and disrupting fediverse instances is no problem either. With websites that is a whole different ballgame because they are manifold.
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Decentralized sales platforms would just suck to use, in general. The Amazon problem is likely something that can only be solved by the legislative processes of the countries it operates in.
I agree on the need for legilature. I strongly disagree on the scam. You dont have massive csam on peertube either because it has manual federation. Everyone who runs a business knows that its much more important to not get sued than to sell stuff. Big difference between small businesses and large ones btw.
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I think the biggest issue is that if you already need to separate payments, returns, shipping, etc... you're left with a shop that also advertises products for other shops, possibly competitors. Then the question becomes... why bother federating at all?
I think it'd be better to set up a FOSS shopping platform, eg something that competes with WooCommerce or the likes. That's significantly easier from a financial and legal perspective, and I think it's an easier sell to actual merchants (why pay a license for that shit, use this one for freeee). Then once you have that running, you could think about optional federation as an addition to an already well-functioning platform.
I used woocommerce in the past. Its not that complicated. Woocommerce is open source from what I read: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/woocommerce-review/ i would have to check the source but implementing federation would be quite trivial i guess.
Why bother federating:
You advertise for your partners, not competitors. This is done already but manually by reselling. This would just expedite the process. The only part that is not yet clear to me is if the shop advertises something from another shop and clearly says, only sale processing through website, not fulfillment, if that would also make it that the legal warranty is done by the downstream vendor. Processing returns also is trivial from a technical perspective. Its just the legal one that keeps me guessing atm.
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I agree on all points except the last. It is no problem to outlaw something and disrupting fediverse instances is no problem either. With websites that is a whole different ballgame because they are manifold.
Instances are websites.
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Instances are websites.
No, they are not.
Instances have websites but the bulk of the fediverse is done on a completely different layer, even a different port.
Fediverse instances are clusters of microservices. They usually include a database, a frontend and a backend. The backend is where the api is and where federation requests come in and go out. Thats where the magic happens.
If you want to test this, just disable the webserver (frontend) and watch the instance still working. You can also see this working when you look at the different frontends of some bigger lemmy instances for example.
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As you said, it exists. You can just clone it from codeberg and run it. Here's an article about it https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/
I'm having a *someone should do it just not me" moment. It looks like each instance is for different European country. Wonder if it would be for individual States
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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?
"Can someone try and poke holes in this idea?"
you are still proposing a federate ad network. payments are left to crypto (not fedi), credit cards (not fedi) or paypal (not fedi). the shipping is done by shops themselves (not fedi) (also amazon handles ~80% of their deliveries, check in this thread for sources). What's a "main shop"? doesn't sound very decentralized. you suggest leaving contestation again to the shops to handle (not fedi).
what exactly are you fediversing here? the proposition to users would basically be a single view with all shops, but then just delegating to them? there can be value in this, i see it mostly as an ad network leveraging AP and I'm really not a fan. it isn't really amazon
being angered by being shown issues in your idea doesn't help your idea. go visit your local hackerspace and start building if you think we're just naysayers
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They dictate the operations of their suppliers. They force large expansions in capital investment and then decide that they don't want to renew the supplier relationship before the financing for the capital investments can be paid back. The only way suppliers can hope avoid this is to do what Walmart wants or constantly change their products in often superficial ways with branding agreements for IP of entertainment companies.
Lol again they're business savy. You're an idiot
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"Can someone try and poke holes in this idea?"
you are still proposing a federate ad network. payments are left to crypto (not fedi), credit cards (not fedi) or paypal (not fedi). the shipping is done by shops themselves (not fedi) (also amazon handles ~80% of their deliveries, check in this thread for sources). What's a "main shop"? doesn't sound very decentralized. you suggest leaving contestation again to the shops to handle (not fedi).
what exactly are you fediversing here? the proposition to users would basically be a single view with all shops, but then just delegating to them? there can be value in this, i see it mostly as an ad network leveraging AP and I'm really not a fan. it isn't really amazon
being angered by being shown issues in your idea doesn't help your idea. go visit your local hackerspace and start building if you think we're just naysayers
Keep your rhetoric. Neither did you show issues nor are there any other folks who were called naysayers because except you, most people were just constructive. Its not hard to do, try it some time.
But now get off of my feed. Byee
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I'm having a *someone should do it just not me" moment. It looks like each instance is for different European country. Wonder if it would be for individual States
I don't follow, sorry. In the meantime I put up an instance. Check out https://freebay.giftedmc.com
The project is pretty small but I'm fairly confident it will grow.
I'll test it for some time and thing about pro's and cons of working with this project instead of forking or building something new.
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I agree on the need for legilature. I strongly disagree on the scam. You dont have massive csam on peertube either because it has manual federation. Everyone who runs a business knows that its much more important to not get sued than to sell stuff. Big difference between small businesses and large ones btw.
You either only federate with a select few instances who vett each seller carefullly or you won't be able to keep track of reputation for each market user.
This isnt a mom and pop shop, its the internet. People won't give af about reputation they'll just keep making new accounts.
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Reading the post, I found what I really want right now: a federated review platform.
Too many times I want to look for a product, and has to look into a reddit thread to see a recommendation.
There should be one, right? Where is it?If it involves money, it has the incentive to game the system. So you’d be dealing with multiple efforts of actors adding fake reviews, sabotaging competitors, endless spam etc.
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Considering your answer to payments solution was "This is trivial.' it sounds like a) You've never run a business and b) you're more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.
All of this talk and purple are ignoring the very fundamental aspect of this sort of transaction: trust.
When you buy from a place, you do it because you trust the store or the service to handle problems [1]. I remember one saying that a purchase is actually a very intimate relationship, and if you have any reason to think that person or service would screw up over, you’d never engage in any monetary transactions with them.
A marketplace where anyone can sell only works because despite your diligence to look for reputable sellers, the platform usually offers some assurance that you’ll be refunded for any type of scam, which means they take on the burden of doing some quality control on approving sellers. At least that’s how it works in Brazil, I suppose that a country with a high societal trust might have less of this problem, but the incentives are the heart of any system.
[1] Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you wanted it and you can end up being screwed by the service, but the expectation was there.
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If it involves money, it has the incentive to game the system. So you’d be dealing with multiple efforts of actors adding fake reviews, sabotaging competitors, endless spam etc.
Argh, that connects it to the shopping platform. I wish there is a way around amazon..
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Lol again they're business savy. You're an idiot
Fuck you. You dunce.
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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.
A version of this focussed on a gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle, or the buy nothing groups on facebook) would also be cool.
Also person-to-person buying/selling, rather than business-to-person would be nice to have, like reverb.com, or used items on ebay.
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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.
Oooh, awesome, thanks for this link!
