Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea!
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I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That's how I know that part is trivial.
You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: https://stripe.com/
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Pretty much what they're doing all over this thread.
Like some people can only see the glass half full. Few have the guys to look at both the fullness and the emptyness equally.
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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. -
God, if only someone had invented an internet-native form of money in 2008
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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.
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What is "meatspace"
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Real life. The offline world. Grassville.
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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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OK Crypto Scammer
Also, FUCK TRANSPHOBES
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Or you can just buy from other online retailers.
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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.
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Ideas are cheap. This is the third post like this I've seen in two weeks. Build it.
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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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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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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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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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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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that is online farmers and flea market? feel free to post a link
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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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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.
