this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
28 points (83.3% liked)

Fediverse

28297 readers
812 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Is it possible to one day replace the privacy nightmare of Amazon with a decentralized merchant network? All I really use Amazon for these day is aggregate customer reviews by query, then buy the items as direct as possible. Why can't respectable tools to this instead? I understand the cost, but could the tech be adopted?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't see that happening. I think the problem is not even technical - ActivityPub could absolutely serve the purpose. My pessimism comes from the incredible potential for spam and just shit products. Take current amazon - it's full of rubbish from aliexpress. Now increase that by a few orders of magnitude, since every merchant could just spin up their own shopfront with no supervision.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed, there needs to be third parties who control quality - just like there are moderators here, if you think about it. We already sort of have those moderators : local shop keepers. I'd be satisfied with a service that allows me to leverage all those local shops without having to leave my place (as I mentioned in an other comment on this page : "Uber Eats/Deliveroo for everything").

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I think the decentralized but moderated review network is the most important part. I like the idea of local shop keepers with specialized knowledge (I’m thinking of my local goto kitchen store) or just online experts (like the folks at whathifi). I like to research a bit (a lot really) before I decide what to buy and a resource like this would be invaluable. Finding it locally after deciding what to buy can be an issue (especially if you are not in the US), but this aspect could be separate, as is shipping.

load more comments (1 replies)