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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comOP
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      1 day ago

      I’m definitely intrigued. I have HUGE prejudices when it comes to blockchain, one being climate impact. The other being privacy of all things. But I can see it as an option.

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comOP
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          11 hours ago

          I’ll have to look into it at some point. The crypto bros could have also been hired by banks at this point to burn crypto as comoetition. I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole before extensive personally conducted research. which is unrealistic even for myself but especially for everyone else.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        1 day ago

        Not crypto, blockchain. When done correctly and you don’t have every user trying to calculate the next hash for some pennies it works pretty well. Computing the hash when an action happens like a purchase is fairly trivial compared to mining.

        Crypto started the concept of the blockchain, at the end though it’s just a distributed immutable audit log. The hash is required, but if done correctly, it’s trivial.

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comOP
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          1 day ago

          in that case this would absolutely be a neat way of doing it. thanks for pointing that out.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
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      1 day ago

      as long as it’s between instances and not exposed to end-users, yeah i think that was the original use case.