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.

  • @Valmond
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    524 hours ago

    The problem they (should/did) solve was scamming, and payments. So you’d need to have some banking system with locked money, disputes etc. IMO that is the complicated part, the rest is just more or less a searchable database.

    • hauiOP
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      119 hours ago

      Its possible that this is pretty sttaightforward. My thought on payment is stripe and paypal atm since they’re already established. They also handle this.

      • @Valmond
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        214 hours ago

        So not decentralised then 😅

        • hauiOP
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          112 hours ago

          Very much decentralized. Just with the caveat that payment decentrlization needs its own project. Successful foss software projects typically have a narrow scope and concentrate on them. Feel free to do the payment part in an adjacent project so that we dont have yo rely on stripe and paypal.

          • @Valmond
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            112 hours ago

            Sorry to bother, good luck.