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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[–] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I really like the idea of a grassroots Amazon competitor. That said,

You need to have a high level of trust. A federated network of shady scams that just take your money and send you nothing half the time is not going to fly. Is there a vetting process, who controls that process, how's all that work. If its 'good seller' reviews, how are those stats protected from manipulation.

You need to have extreme ease of use. UI barriers that seem trivial to developers can sink a platform.

If there are problems solvable by centralization, maybe that could be done as a cooperative organization which devs and vendors can join and run democratically.

[–] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

Another issue might be, how do you deal with people selling illegal items/services? How do you avoid "Silk Road" style liability? Would there be a blacklist that someone running an instance could use so they don't have to vet everyone they are federated with?

[–] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wonder if you can 'outsource' trust by relying on payment systems? If a seller uses stripe and scams some users, stripe would freeze their account right?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Correct. Someone orders something, it doesn't arrive, they dispute the charge with their CC company, their CC company and Stripe talk to one another and get the merchant's side of the story, and basically unless there is some pretty massive indication that the buyer is lying or has a consistent pattern of this or something, the buyer gets their money back. If that happens a bunch, the seller loses their Stripe account.

The system is heavily biased in favor of the buyer, which for the most part works out, because most of the fraud exists on the seller end. And on the whole the fact that 99% of people on both sides are not cockheads trying to abuse the system, is what makes it all work reasonably well.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 0 points 2 days ago

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.