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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[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

So not decentralised then 😅

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Sorry to bother, good luck.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

That's a solved issue. Monero escrow services have been doing exactly this for the dark web for years now

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah but that doesn't solve anything for the average Joe. Nor lost packages or scamming tactics etc.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 0 points 7 hours ago

If u get scammed u report it and the escrow doesn't release the funds to the seller. The technology is the same its just the application that differs.