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

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by demesisx@infosec.pub to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] demesisx@infosec.pub 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I like OpenBazaar a lot but when people hear the words crypto, they run the other way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge proponent of crypto (I moderate a ton of crypto communities) but I just don’t think it’s necessary in this case. I think this idea doesn’t necessarily need incentivized computation or many of the amazing features that crypto could offer (which also introduce some tradeoffs as well). Of course, if this were to go 100% crypto-based, it would be a lot easier for me to spin up digital transactions and incorporate them to the system but for now, this idea is a bit more like OpenBazaar minus crypto and adding a bit of centralization and federation.

Thanks for the downvote. I can see you’re just here to be disingenuous.