Fediverse

Wasn't a federated Amazon just a mall, in a way?

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.

Instead of Amazon. Id do fediverse equivalent of Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Which technically exists in. Europe it just needs to be imported to the US

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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 work in the IT department for a fairly large payment service provider. I can tell you now that you seem to be vastly underestimating both the financial aspect of this as well as several legal aspects.

• Federation would almost certainly have to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't think you're going to pass KYC checks for any PSP if it's opt-out, the risk of someone (ever so briefly) selling illegal goods through your website is too great otherwise. Stripe would just shut down your account (if they even let you open it), PayPal probably won't let you open it at all.

• Selling goods from other sites through your own, makes you liable for any returns, warranty claims etc... Simply "passing these on" isn't going to cut it. If the other site disagrees with the customer claim, you are on the hook for it, because it was sold through your website.

• The financial logistics aspect here is really complex. If you're going to process payments on behalf of another site, you have to deal with reconciliation. After reconciliation you have to the send the money to the other shop, incurring additional (sometimes surprisingly sizeable) fees. And coming from someone who deals with (automated) reconciliation on a daily basis, every payment method does it differently and they all find extremely creative ways to mess up your systems. And that includes unannounced changes, mistakes, random unexplained fees, failure to deliver settlement files, etc...

• How do you deal with the risk of scam instances? E.g. instance A tells instance B that a product was sold and the payment was processed. B sends it out, but it turns out the customer was the owner of A, and there was no payment at all. B just lost a product with very little chance of getting it back.

• Then there's practical aspects. How do you deduplicate products in search? Or will you have dozens of listings for the exact same product?

The only remotely viable way I see this working is if only search is actually federated. Once you are on a product page, you can only pay using the payment page of the instance that has the product. You won't be able to pay for products of multiple instances at once, and you might lose some unified styling. But at least that approach has a chance of passing KYC and deals with all the legal issues regarding returns/warranties etc..., and it reduces the scam risk because you're in charge of your own payments. But at that point, you've only federated product search and nothing else, and then as a consumer you might as well just Google it instead.

I appreciate you have experience in running a business, but running a marketplace, especially a very complicated one, is really not like running a usual business.

Ideas are cheap. This is the third post like this I've seen in two weeks. Build it.

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.

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.