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Has Anyone Ever Pulled Off Federated Inventory? (infosec.pub)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of the fediverse and repurposing it toward the goal of creating a free and open, decentralized, federated network of vendors that run instances or groups of vendors that run one instance together. These instances would broadcast inventory updates to each node that they federate with. It would start off niche and gain traction that way before branching out into other retail types.

Is this a feasible idea? Has any pulled this off? Wayfair, Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy are already suffering from enshittification. Someone needs to take the inventory out of the walled gardens and back into the customer’s hands. I shouldn’t have to rely on Google to find products I want. There are vendors that want to sell me stuff nearby…it’s just a problem of connecting the user to the content..and this seems like a no-brainer.

I’d love to have a discussion about this. I am seriously considering creating a rolling fork of Lemmy that would maintain parity but also add this functionality but I want to talk to experts and weigh the pros and cons before embarking on such an ambitious project.

edit: I also started a community ( https://infosec.pub/c/federated_inventory ) dedicated to the discussion of this idea. I'm trying to get vendors in a budding local industry to fund the creation of this system, which would branch out into all retail industries eventually along with the network effect.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Look at Enterprise Resource Planning software as they handle inventories with millions of skus. You'll have to build a database so you'll want to look at federation there as well. I know you can do distributed clusters. This would also be a good use of blockchain as you'd be able to have historical pricing that way.

A good place to start may be the below article

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-05-27-decentralized-database/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thank you so much for your help. I’ll definitely look into it.

A few thoughts: true decentalization, as your article says, brings with it many requirements for trustlessness. That's particularly why I think that "instance operators" or the retailers listing the goods would be the only users with the permission to submit inventory items at first. That would solve the trust part of the trilemma until sufficiently decentralized technologies (crowd sourced oracles that list goods) are mature and understood enough to slowly and methoidcally be slotted in to replace them.