Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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I think it makes sense. It would allow a decentralized unified search across all stores. With Lemmy I can search posts as long as the instance is federated. With this I could find products.
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In this example instances are stores, stores are users in instances? How stores are protected to be defederated by competitors (we are talking about money and making a living here).
What it adds to just a simple centralized service that any store can join. If you don't want it to be another amazon, make that service a coop. or some kinds of non-profit that it's paid by the stores that want to become part of that.
I think here we are in the classic conundrum of "a solution in search of a problem".
Fediverse and ActivityPub is cool, but it's a social media thing. And decentralization is cool when needed, for instance social media. But it doesn't have to make sense for every use case.
For what's being proposed there's zero actual need for decentralization or ActivityPub.
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Lol that's called business. It's why nothing came from any of the investigations accusing them of not doing enough to protect workers employed by other companies they purchased from. It also happened around 2015ish and all the articles I found from 2020 praise their supply chain managment.
https://www.marketingscoop.com/consumer/walmart-supply-chain-strategy/
I mean they were called out for not being attentive enough and they responded in a way you would hope a company would respond. Albeit an article written by walmart but still they owned up and addressed it.
Haven't found a single source that supports your claim that the issue went on for decades either so feel free to provide some sources and I'll be happy to read them and adjust my opinion accordingly.
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Instances are stores (think Amazon or Etsy). Products are posts. Sellers are users.
Stores aren't protected from being defederated. You can still search Google or whatever, still visit the site and buy stuff. It just will not be a unified search, just like how anything else works with ActivityPub.
The good stores would be run by admins who don't have an incentive to defederate from others. Stores don't make money or take a cut from sellers anyway. The sellers aren't in charge of the instance, just like an Etsy seller can't do anything about the fact that they have competitors on Etsy.
The need for decentralization is that the store / Amazon / Etsy is broken up but the search and interactions, reviews, etc. are unified.
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Do you have numbers for this? I tried to find some, and couldn't.
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Those admins are unpaid?
Managing a store it's a LOT of work. And you are doing to provide profit for other people. Who is going to do it for free?
It's not like social media where people may volunteer to admin and mod, and users may donate because it's a common goal of share information, opinions, knowledge, funny stuff etc.
Here we are talking about bussiness that do what they do because they want money. I would not volunteer to admin a store so shop owners could earn money, that's for sure.
And I still not see the advantage of doing within the ActivityPub instead of just being a normal service where all interested shops could join.
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Wasn't a federated Amazon just a mall, in a way?
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Good point!
The mall was still centralized and most shops didnt have their own place and a stall ij the mall but I can totally see where you're coming from.
It might be a good idea to keep this in mind if this ever becomes reality and we need marketing ideas.
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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.
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Yeah, so 18% of the stuff is shipped by someone else. IDK if you want to call that "a lot", but I definitely wouldn't call it "very few." Anyway glad we got to the answer, however to characterize it.
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A mall is a private real estate instrument built by speculators to extract rent from businesses and it's actually rather predatory. This is fundamentally not real estate and fundamentally does not exist to extract rent, so it's more like "what if you took a mall and removed all the mall-ness from it".
If malls were collectively owned by the stores that comprise them and pieces of the mall could appear and disappear at will of whoever's participating... Is it actually even still a mall really???
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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.
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There is absolutely nothing "simple" about that. It sounds simple, but what does "someone has purchased a product" actually mean, in technical terms?
Let's start basic, since this is a proposal about a federated system, there are instances. Who runs these and why? Does ever seller run an instance? can there be users/customers on those? if not, who runs the customer-instances? Who defines what a product is, and are products like communities? or more like posts? how do you correlate different sellers selling the same item, where a review would obviously apply to both? can you review a shop or seller? Are delivery services their own "entitty" and can you review those, too? When you purchase an item
Now without any answers to any of those question, let's just go to the next level. Where are the reviews stored? in the instance where the item is sold (possibly owned by the shop)? or with the user? if it's with the user, how does a webserver displaying an item find all the reviews for it? Does this differ between reviews for items and reviews of shops/sellers?
If a review is stored on the instance of the seller, he can just add an entry to the database stating "user x purchased item y", and the review is valid. If the reviews are stored with the user, he can spin up an instance, and create a bunch of users there who can leave reviews, because he can mark sales as "valid" as the seller, no matter if there was any item and/or money exchanged.
I wrote all of this thinking about the classic sellers attempt at "creating good reviews to boost a product", but there is the opposite threat of review-bombing (might be a competing product or seller, or you just don't like pink shirts and decide to review-bomb those): How you protect against those has similarities, but reverses the roles essentially. Sellers are now the "target", and reviewers the "threat".
Aaaand this all is just about reviews, which have no monetary value. The platforms main goal would be to deal with physical items, exchanged for real money, and creating physical effects (like shipping). All those have to also be secured in a much more robust way. If a fake review or two slip through the cracks, who cares. But if just one valuable item goes missing (or is never shipped), or the payment for it, that's immediately a problem.
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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? -
Reading the post, I found what I really want right now: a federated review platform.
[email protected] is a general review site. It currently covers media but, if you can get the data in (SKUs?) I can't see a reason it couldn't cover other products.
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Ur gonna hate what I say next but it is the solution to all the trust issues. Monero. U can use the transaction on the blockchain to verify payments, reviews, etc.
I would suppose the instance gets a 1% cut of products sold on its platform incentivising it to be better than the other instances. U solve the adding fake reviews thing by a review requiring a transaction on the xmr blockchain u can solve the removing issue since anyone can prove that a review was removed in bad faith (obviously u want to retain the right to remove reviews with people saying awful shit).
Since everything is federated u can design it so there is 0 cost to using a different instance hence an instance acting in bad faith will lose its 1% cut and thus gives it a strong incentive to behave.
If u wanna get real creative u could do a system of federated logistics where u track items with cryptographic signatures. Each logistics actor signs for the product from the previous logistics actor until the original customer recieves the product at which point funds are released to vendor and delivery. This system would allow package tracking through a decentralised logistics systems (can assign fault for loss to the actor at fault) can allow actors to specialise for a location/route and take advantage of economies of scale.
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flea market
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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? -
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.
