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.
I know that Federation is exciting, but all these ideas for federated services are really missing the reason why the Fediverse’s current bits are successful - because they have low moral hazard.
When you get into economics and meatspace relationships, moral hazard skyrockets.
Accepting payments and creating “contracts” over the Fediverse is no bueno at the current time. I think it would require some kind of 3rd party, almost PayPal-esque (PayPal has its own controversy) service that would create the obligation and associated penalties that come with an online transaction. Could be the instance itself but as you said that’s a risk most instance owners wouldn’t take.
Accepting payments isn’t some kind of wild adventure that will inevitably doom your operation. People do it all the time, you can set up a Stripe account in a few minutes. You could, if you wanted (and you would probably want to go this route at least initially), require people to have a Stripe account or something and get paid directly from the buyer without you being involved. And then just charge a flat fee to the merchants or something, if you wanted to make the whole thing sustainable.
Stripe is well-equipped to deal with issues of taxes, fraud, refunds, and so on for micro-level businesses. Once you get into accepting payments and re-disbursing them to people, you’ve opened up a whole can of worms which probably means you should be spending a couple thousand dollars on lawyers and accountants to make sure it’s all on the up-and-up, but even then, it’s not unsolvable. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, that’s all. Jim Bob’s Towing with his 2 pillhead employees manages to do it every day. It’s how Jim Bob financed his boat. It’s fine.
Exactly, you probably want a 3rd party to handle the money exchange part. Doesn’t mean a Fedi app can’t facilitate everything else.
Sure, but the type of people looking to use federated selling platforms are unlikely to want to use something like Stripe
Then they are being silly.
I actually don’t think that would be an issue in practice, given how alarmingly eager Fediverse instance operators are to get in bed with Cloudflare and AWS. But, if you are accepting payments, you are for the forseeable future going to be working with some kind of financial processor, and Stripe is far from the worse of the bunch as far as that is concerned.
That is a very good point! Thank you! I figured someone would find a constructive way to argue why something might be better than something else and you are that person. This would kind of speak to the idea of crypto which I dont really like on first sight but it would at least give the ability to audit, right?
Crypto doesn’t really solve any of the problems that a payment processor wouldn’t also solve, unfortunately.
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.
Imagine Ebay but with even less scam prevention.
An e-commerce site invariably involves a level of responsibility that I don’t think would fly in a federated environment.
I really don’t see the appeal of activity-pub for this.
It’s a protocol used for social media and interactions. You describe just sort of a “metastore”.
Maybe a review store site could work better with activity pub.
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 each instance would be dealing with multiple attempts from actors adding fake reviews, sabotaging competitors, endless spam etc. If it can be easily automated, the service would be 24/7 filled with AI spam and drive away all users, defeating the purpose entirely.
The only trustworthy reviews are from people who actually bought the product in the website, because then it has a negative incentive to spend that much money for one fake review.
Argh, that connects it to the shopping platform. I wish there is a way around amazon…
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 craigslist, reverb.com, gumtree, or used items on ebay.
If this was focused on a craigslist/gumtree style of selling, where most of the actual trade is done off-site/in-person with cash or bank transfers, it would completely side-step the payment processor problem.
You don’t seem to understand the retail operations of Amazon. They provide logistics and marketing services to retailers, they also directly compete against those retailers because those retailers can’t do better at logistics and marketing without using Amazon’s services.
So online farmers/flea market?
flea market
Or you can just buy from other online retailers.
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.
amazons true strength is ultimately in their logistics. Amazon itself isn’t a bad idea in theory but the execution is poor because of cutthroat capitalism exploiting workers and privatization. Ultimately the idea of sellers being able to ship their goods to communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized. The marketplace can be federated, sure
communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized.
Domestic terrorism vibes here
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.
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)
how to ship goods?
Part of their point was that Amazon doesn’t handle shipping for a lot of the things they sell. If you want to, they can store everything within their massively-optimized operation and ship it for you for a small-enough-to-be-compelling fee, but you don’t have to. You can also just list your stuff there and ship it to customers when they order it.
how to process payments?
This is trivial. The modern financial internet makes it extremely easy.
how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?
This is a fair point, probably the biggest issue that could be a stumbling block. One fair counterpoint is that Amazon’s handling of these situations is often pure uncaring dogshit, so if you’re doing a bad job at it, you’re still no different than Amazon (and potentially better than, since it is hard to see how someone could be any worse.)
It’s not totally simple, and you have to do some real actual work to solve it, but it’s also not like going to the moon. It’s solvable.
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 is actually 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.
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!
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.
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 !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca 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 !neodb@lemmy.zip 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, !friendica@lemmy.ca 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.
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.
That’s true of lots of non-federated sites. Anything with an API…
No, federated model is chosen over distributed model or centralized model to allow feuds, putting it simply.
That may work for a Reddit alternative, but doesn’t work for markets. Helps moderation (some idea of it, I don’t think that idea is good), but definitely hurts a single space to sell and buy stuff.
Which is why cryptobros and such types make either centralized or distributed systems.
So much for using computer networks for this.
Now about Amazon specifically - your post omits the whole warehouses and logistics part. Which is most of Amazon’s core business.
Computer people today somehow started forgetting that real life is very hard and complex. When I was a kid (born 1996, so not old man), computers had a promise of making that real life easier, and from time to time delivered on it, but at some point bullshit like glossy buttons and Web 2.0 and social media became a thing in itself, and everyone started behaving as if it’s done, we now can look down like olympic gods to those mortals messing around in dirt, and sometimes easily solve their problems. We can’t.
Getting back to logistics - one has to design a system of shared warehouses, transportation, mailing and delivery tasks, tracking, reporting on outcomes of every event, and all that should be even more abuse-resilient than the processes inside actual Amazon. You’ll have Byzantine problems in every interaction.
The “distributed king of all social media, solving once and for all the problem of centralized platforms” that I’m often dreaming about is realistic compared to that.
I like the idea and it could work very well for smaller communities. In fact, theyre already doing something similar called “Werbering” (advertising ring) in germany. It takes the idea and elevates it into the digital space.
Thats an interesting bit of information. Thanks! :)
ITT: OP has an “idea” and no money. Please do all the work.
We are not your thinktank bro
Why do you hate fun
I think op sees us as exactly that. His thinktank. Isn’t that kinda the whole point of a social network?
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.
I buy stuff from Ebay and Etsy plenty often.
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.
