Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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So in simple terms, you propose to build a mom-and-pop shop and have it act like a global player like Amazon?
Congrats, it does not happen very often I sit in a chair and stare at the screen in disbelief!
Whatever your idea of a mom and pop shop and acting like a global player is, I'm not thinking of anything like this. As I mentioned. This already exists. The idea is to automate and streamline some parts, basically.
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I order stuff from ebay. Got a phone on the way from china right now. Ebay work-alike might not be a bad place to start.
Exactly. The idea is to not make a perfect copy but a viable alternative without the constant breaks in design and trust when scouring the web for items. All those funny labels on websites for example like trustedshops are just for this. If one could make a web of trust, that would eliminate fakes and take power from for profit companies who make these labels and control trust.
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It's much more than that. Amazon's strength is also in its proximity warehouses and contacts with delivery companies.
Otherwise you just have a federated Ebay.
Amazon has a lot of different aspects, same as facebook and xitter. I aim to think of alternatives, not perfect copies. My only hard target is that it is free from single entity control. Thats why not ebay or one of the others. Flohmarkt is kind of promising but i'll check it out deeper and host an instance. That way I can judge its potential.
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You are completely misunderstanding what Amazon actually does, and why it's successful, despite being a shitty company. It's first and foremost a logistics company. People can order "stuff" in many places, but if they order it on Amazon, they'll get it by tomorrow if they order it before midnight. They got warehouse everywhere. They do (some) of their own final deliveries for anyone close to those, use the big logistics players for the rest (ups, DHL, ...) while having massive volume and the power to dictate price that comes with that. The number of workers in the warehouses is actually minuscule for their size, it's all automated. Huge up front cost, very low cost once it's actually running.
Consumers go there because they can get literally anything. Again: warehouses. It's also a market place but that only works (these days) because it's THE place the people go. The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
How would you ever get anyone to go to your federated version for shopping that sells like "some" things? Even if you manage to combine all those shops, you'd need a way to agree on what an item is called (or how to assign id numbers) so the same item from multiple sellers is grouped in the same offer, and many similar small things you take for granted it didn't even ever see/notice on Amazon.
I'd really appreciate your points, were they not shrouded in condescension. I understand very well what amazon does.
If you feel like helping, think of constructive things to say. Otherwise dont waste your energy.
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@haui_lemmy I had a mostly similar idea a few weeks ago but I'm a mess ( sleep issues ) so no coding for me.
But yes, as I mentioned somewhere extending activitypub could be a start.You dont need to code. Help can have many forms. Ideas, counsel, testing, building, planning, etc. Feel free to dm me if you're interested in building something. The most promising start so far was flohmarkt. It already kind of does something remotely like this but its very young. I'll check it out and report back.
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There is no real point. You did not seem to get what the other person said and so I added it to make it a bit more clear on why its not an amazon replacement because amazon does so much more. Its just sorta how conversations involving a few people work. Im not just talking about the last thing you said but about the whole read down the line.
Got it. Thanks for chiming in. I never meant to clone the company. I'm talking about amazon.com maybe I didnt make that clear enough, sorry.
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Got it. Thanks for chiming in. I never meant to clone the company. I'm talking about amazon.com maybe I didnt make that clear enough, sorry.
im sorry so you did not meant to clone amazon.com in a federated way but your talking about amazon.com? im a bit confused myself at this point.
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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.
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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.
So... Postmates/Instacart but using activitypub for... Some reason?
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You dont need to code. Help can have many forms. Ideas, counsel, testing, building, planning, etc. Feel free to dm me if you're interested in building something. The most promising start so far was flohmarkt. It already kind of does something remotely like this but its very young. I'll check it out and report back.
@haui_lemmy Flomarket is more like a separate shops, you need a protocol, and gui's that are easy to embed via EU made web frameworks like drupal. ( React to be avoided as it's from meta ) That way you see the shop on the individual site but also can create aggregators that look like ebay or ammazon but are federated.
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You are completely misunderstanding what Amazon actually does, and why it's successful, despite being a shitty company. It's first and foremost a logistics company. People can order "stuff" in many places, but if they order it on Amazon, they'll get it by tomorrow if they order it before midnight. They got warehouse everywhere. They do (some) of their own final deliveries for anyone close to those, use the big logistics players for the rest (ups, DHL, ...) while having massive volume and the power to dictate price that comes with that. The number of workers in the warehouses is actually minuscule for their size, it's all automated. Huge up front cost, very low cost once it's actually running.
Consumers go there because they can get literally anything. Again: warehouses. It's also a market place but that only works (these days) because it's THE place the people go. The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
How would you ever get anyone to go to your federated version for shopping that sells like "some" things? Even if you manage to combine all those shops, you'd need a way to agree on what an item is called (or how to assign id numbers) so the same item from multiple sellers is grouped in the same offer, and many similar small things you take for granted it didn't even ever see/notice on Amazon.
The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
The reviews on Amazon are so often very obviously bots, that they aren't really trustworthy at all. What the hell is inherently untrustworthy about federation? π€¨
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im sorry so you did not meant to clone amazon.com in a federated way but your talking about amazon.com? im a bit confused myself at this point.
Amazon.com is a marketplace, separate from aws and all their other endeavors. It is not important for this idea that they have a billion different things working.
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So... Postmates/Instacart but using activitypub for... Some reason?
Again, how about a non condescending way to deliver your feedback? Its valid and I'll check it. Just take the win.
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Amazon.com is a marketplace, separate from aws and all their other endeavors. It is not important for this idea that they have a billion different things working.
I mean sure but again that is akin to ebay. ebay is amazone without the warehouses, shipping, and logistics intelligence and organization. so anyone that wants to avoid amazon could use ebay right now but they don't because they want the benefits of the fast shipping and returns and such. again I think having some sort of federated marketplace would be great but it would in no way be like ordering from amazon.
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The reviews are also a massive point, and would be inherently untrustworthy in a federated version.
The reviews on Amazon are so often very obviously bots, that they aren't really trustworthy at all. What the hell is inherently untrustworthy about federation? π€¨
But you're saying yourself that those are "obviously bots". It's easy to ignore those. And just to be clear, I really did mean the reviews, and not the score (where the skew is less transparent).
Everyone leaving a review has to have an account somewhere in the federated network. This includes seeing up an instance just to use it for review bots, or fake votes on something. Obviously there's is defederation and other mechanisms, and I'm sure there are ways to improve the situation. But the whole base setup is just inherently much harder to get into a trustworthy position. Even the common centralized sites (not just Amazon) have trouble getting it under control when they can "see" will the related data, for finding outliers and such. I'm just saying it's an even harder proposition.
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I'd really appreciate your points, were they not shrouded in condescension. I understand very well what amazon does.
If you feel like helping, think of constructive things to say. Otherwise dont waste your energy.
Condescension was not the intention at all. The fact that you mention logistics only as a foot note is what lead me to believe you really didn't understand, and it was just meant as an explanation. Amazon is just scale, in every aspect, and I don't think that can be achieved with a federated approach in the physical retail world.
As for being constructive, you can be constructive by talking someone out of an idea. I really don't believe there's any viability in the idea, no matter how much I wish there was. I personally value my time, so I assume others do as well. I consider saving someones time incredibly constructive, but that only applies if you intend to pursue the idea to actually get somewhere "real" with it, let's say reaching "profit" or improving participants existing profits.
You might enjoy spending your time figuring out solutions here, maybe you see it as an economic experiment or hobby project, so it's fun no matter the outcome. I'm that case my comment really isn't constructive in your situation, and I'm sorry.
Rest assured I didn't comment out of malice.
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Most crypto markets yes they are manipulated because their value is purely speculative and not tied to physical goods. Xmr is used extensively across the dark web tiring it to real world goods stabilising its value.
U think the government or a bank should have the right to just freeze ur money whenever they want or feel like it? U want ur entire purchase history being sold to databrokers who will use it to profile you so they can sell u crap and up ur insurance rates to the maximum point possible.
If u looked at my profile u would have noticed an Aussie flag so ur american argument doesn't work.
U still haven't found a metric by which xmr is worse.
I could see XMR being less manipulated on a relative basis, but all of crypto is far far more manipulated than any fiat (even of small country of say 3 million people). Because real currency reflect real economic activity that spans a broad range of use cases.
Yeah, I don't believe in edgelord type stuff. You do want the government to be able to freeze the money of criminals and malicious oligarchs.
You don't need Monero (or crypto) to solve the databroker issue. It's a matter of expectations,vstandards and law enforcement. And you know that Monero won't solve the data collection issue. The products you purchase aren't on a blockchain platform and they interact with the real world, therefore you can make a dataset for tracking of them.
Don't look at people's profiles.
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If you have a network of paricipating stores, then they can agree to take each others physical returns and inspect them.
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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.
Collective buying and building of such a project means that there is not universal standard or regulation and the project falls apart when there is disagreement. Given the scale this is inevitable
Look at lemmy for example: most servers play nicely but occasionally you get the server like exploding heads that cause the overwhelming majority to defederate
Amazon has 300 warehouses across the US and another 175 worldwide according to a quick web search. Thatβs a lot of sites that have to play nice with each other. If even one of them starts having poor practices, doing something offensive, something disruptive, etc. it may cause a lot of the others to not want to work with them. If you have one that is especially shit stirring then it may cause a huge portion of the network to cut ties.
But unlike lemmy now itβs not just some social media where you jump to a new server. Now companies have their products held hostage. Now people in that region potentially have services significantly disrupted. Now your whole system is undermined and a bezos type can swoop in to prove his is much better and more trustworthy.
A state controlling it (which would inherently happen with collective ownership if done correctly, a pseudo state would be created given the scale) would introduce regulation and enforcement to ensure consistency in operation. It is then the responsibility of the constituents to hold representatives accountable to ensure regulations and enforcement are meaningful
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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)
Bittorrent is federated streaming video before it was cool.
