ActivityPub (the protocol used by the fediverse) has recently had a proposal to expand it incorporate marketplace exchanges of information. See the proposal, and a discussion thread
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Looks good. While it looks more oriented towards a second-hand marketplace, its concepts can be extended to include business-to-consumer interactions as well. A mix of these systems could enhance the marketplace ecosystem's versatility and usefulness. Thanks for sharing the proposal
Well it’s a new proposal and open to suggestions and further extensions of course.
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This is very interesting to me and I've played with this kinda idea a few weeks ago, the Activity Pub proposal you linked seems very sensible for communicating between actors but doesn't really offer much of a path to create a platform. In my view creating a platforms is the reason this should exist, because current platforms (Amazon,Ebay,Uber, AirBnB,DoorDash,Lieferheld) are mostly just engaging in rent seeking from buyers/sellers on their platforms. Rentier Capitalism
I don't believe a protocol can sufficiently challenge the current players without an underpinning organizational structure that ensures fairness and transparency to both sellers and buyers, when it comes to moderation, indexing, and categorization. Especially moderation but also hosting will have costs, and the consequences for bad moderation are likely much larger with commerce than with social media. So I would like a Coop with significant control from both sellers and buyers to provide the public facing platform which then federates with the Stores which can be self hosted by sellers (potentially as an extension to existing eCommerce Software).
Or alternatively two Coops if it's not reasonable for the sellers to host their own Stores e.g.: Uber and AirBnB, here the sellers should outright own the one providing the Stores, and own the minority in the one providing the Coop. Obviously middle grounds could also exist where e.g.: a Platform for Delivery food federates with seller servers that are hosted on a local level by Coops comprising of restaurants of a region.
I very deeply believe something like this could make our commerce much better and fairer, and while getting it of the ground might be hard, I think because the sellers make money on these Platforms it should give real incentive to develop both the tech and the legal orgs as well as advertise for them, and for the sellers to invest real money into it, or maybe agree to kick 1-2% of a purchase back to the coop.
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Decentralized marketplace will just look like Craigslist and Facebook and other classified marketplaces; chock full of spam and scams.
Adding some element of democracy (like voting on posts) could maybe improve both those marketplace sites.
I think it would improve any site really. Imagine how much better Instagram or Facebook would be if one could downvote stupid shit and the posters would see what people actually thought about their posts/comments. But that might lead to sads, and therefore less active users, so they won't allow it.
Democracy is pretty cool though imo.
This is kind of like what happens internally on platforms for 3rd party sellers like eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress. Even decades later they're still working the kinks out obviously. Amazon and AliExpress particularly have lots of scammers, so they clearly haven't figured out the secret sauce yet. They're not under-resourced, so either they're under-motivated to weed it out or it's actually pretty tricky to do.
My guess is it's both, but more that it's just tricky to implement a reliable system of reputation and trust. EBay and Amazon got around it early on by being cheap and establishing policies that heavily favored buyers in disputes, which made the prospect of using the service less risky to the public, improving their market shares. They probably also have non-trasparent systems for tracking buyer reputations as well to avoid abuse.
It seems to be the norm to keep these systems obscure to avoid abuse, but to make a truly functional open platform you would need to have public systems, so I'd hope that the norm of obfuscation is out of convenience or laziness and isn't required to make the system function.
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The Federation would provide a great tool of figuring out the best way to build trust. A reputable server will only let people join if they are in some way reputable. Servers that let scammers flourish will become defederated. If course servers have to be comparable in size. If there's one server with 90% of users it doesn't work that well.
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they may leak data or store it improperly
And you would rather trust Joe Random who's hosting part of a marketplace website from their home?
It's crypto all over again, ~~blockchain~~ decentralize everything even when it doesn't make sense!
There's a world where it can make sense, due to advancing technology and education. We don't live in it.
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Think you just described crypto markets, and it'd be overrun with scams, fraud, legal issues, and zero accountability. Also my payment info and shipping address is the very last thing I want given to random decentralized instances ran by unknown people. No thanks.
At least when Amazon sends something shitty, they'll fight back against the seller and you're actually receiving something. Also big tech is significantly less likely to ever expose your personal information (addresses, payment info, etc) then some random instance owner.
So this is absolutely a terrible idea in a digital environment.
I’ve worked on payment systems. It is very hard to federate unless something like Stripe is used for actual payment.
Credit card companies simply won’t interface with you unless you prove their data is safe. It isn’t a process that scales well.
Brick and mortar companies get around this by having payment terminals which are insanely locked down. (Which is also why those terminals mostly suck)
Payment terminal aren't as locked down as you think.
They are shitty because manufacturers do the bare minimum and always ask for exceptions (and they often are granted).
Processors only want as much terminal as possible out there to make more money.
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For me what drives me to Amazon is their logistics (1-2 days delivery, free delivery), their no-bullshit assurance and the gigantic inventory. 3rd can certainly be reached with a decentralised alternative. 2nd maybe even though rogue actors could hop instances and trust building is I guess challenging with an open model and 1st isn’t going to happen.
I hate the marketplace thing, and the harder it became to filter out third parties the more I ordered outside of amazon.
I came to amazon back then because it was one seller offering most I cared about, and a single contact for everything. More and more stuff is now only available via 3rd parties - and with that I can just order stuff bypassing amazon.
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Amazon has gone downhill massively in the last few years (in the UK anyway). Free delivery is only for orders over £20 now if you don't have Prime, and they make it really difficult for you to pay for delivery as an option. Prime is no longer next day delivery, or even guaranteed delivery by a specific date.
My last 2 orders were marked as delivered but haven't arrived. It was so difficult to get a refund for the first one (you have to go through a chat bot now which wasn't easy to find on their app) and I haven't been able to get a refund for the second one yet as it was a 3rd party seller and they haven't responded to my message.
I'm trying to use other sellers as much as possible now. It's also often cheaper to go direct I'm finding lately.
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E-commerce isn't as much of a monopoly as "reddit-style social media".
Technically anyone has the ability to open an eshop and sell whatever they want (provided they follow the appropriate sales/tax laws etc).
It's just that people don't like to buy from no-name shops online, as reputations give a level of accountability.
I imagine a lot of people got their credit card details stolen when the first eshops appeared.
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The India Govt established an Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) which is a federated e-commerce system.
Details at ONDC YouTube
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This is a bad idea, Mr random hoster could literally just scam people, and there would be no way to remove him
Plus the illegal items being sold. Who would monitor those.
Piracy communities have been defederated just because worlds wants to preempt legal trouble, just in case the moderation there slips up.
What more for physical items, such as illegal drugs and our services. The fediverse might quickly find itself to be a clear net version of the silk road, or a real hotbed of counterfeit items.
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India has actually developed such an open platform: the open network for digital commerce.
https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Network_for_Digital_Commerce
So the software is there. You only need to adapt it to Europe and get people to use it.
Shipping and logistics would be a royal pain. Efficiency there is why Amazon can be cheap.
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Is the whole Amazon obsession just a North American thing? I've bought like 4 things from them in my life and nothing since about 2016 and I haven't felt at all inconvenienced. From my perspective it's not too hard to either buy from local companies, directly from foreign manufacturers, or from aliexpress if all else fails; that may just be because I'm not American though!
The reason why I choose Amazon is buying from many different stores without creating an account for each and every one. Nevermind that paying is easy.
Also returning stuff is very easy and uncomplicated when buying stuff from Amazon.
They have a huge market share in Europe too. And it's very hard to compete with them, because in online retail the advantages given by economy of scale are brutal.
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There is the very promising @Interledger Foundation, which aims to produce a defederated "open and inclusive payments network that puts humanity first". It could eventually prove useful for money flow on federated platforms.
I'm intuitively critical of all online financial services like this one, but then you realize it was not only funded by the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons, but it's actively support by the w3 consortium. Furthermore, it doesn't use blockchain.
don't see mention of magpie market yet https://codeberg.org/MagpieMarket
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I think this is a bad idea. Not to be a downer but commercialism is what is rotting the web. Bringing that cancer to the Fediverse would be asking for the same.
I think having your own store you control, like with WooCommerce, is enough.
What we need is more freedom respecting payment system and the closest thing I saw someone is working on is GNU Taler.
I had the same idea but there's a lot of actual tangible assets that have to be dealt with.
The first part is picking a pilot country which is probably where the developer lives. The second is either investing in or partnering with Fast ship locations - you need a service or partner that you can use like Amazon prime to store inventory across a country, and last is shipping and delivery maybe it's baked in. I bet there's a company that does this that has an API or partnership program.
In other words you have to establish partnerships or literally incentivize real people to invest in order to create the same value as Amazon. The magic of amazon isn't really that's it's like eBay and buying things online, it's that I can get it so soon.
Ah yes, finally a place to sell high end custom made fur suits with for crypto.
Sounds good, but with how the Fediverse operates, you'd be sharing all your information with everyone. It would need to be a lot more secure and reliable than it is.
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Oh, so Shopify + Stripe but decentralized. It sounds... It might have some security issues, and of course banks might offer some resistance.
I wouldn't say amazon provides a good experience. Their UI has always been crap and often I can't even filter my search with obvious values.
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