Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

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.