[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

Wouldn't that just be ebay? Or ebay before they began expanding? In most instances nowadays you can buy direct from manufacturer as well, and that's becoming more common as time passes and companies invest in their own distribution infrastructure

Oh you mean something like online shopping in general?

I have zero trust in anything decentralized in relation to money. Would definitely like a central authority to complain to when someone scams me. Implementing it like lemmy would make it impossible to effectively ban scammers and would also make searching for stuff annoying as hell. I already hate how annoying it is to search for things on different instances for this stuff.

wouldn't that be mostly an insurance company? The 2 main things that Amazon delivers are fast delivery and hassle free service. ordered? At your doorstep in a day. not happy? send it back, no worries broken after 2 years? Send it back, no worries

I can't see that delivered decentralised without a massive insurance or CoC behind it. But if: Would be awesome

I don't know man, I think that the realm of money and commerce does need some higher regulation, at least for security. But I don't know, maybe my brain is still too primitive to get something like that. I would first try social networks and then see if it can be done with money and physical goods.

My go-to method is to find something on Amazon and then see if I can buy it direct from the manufacturer. I may the up paying a little more for shipping, but that's fine.

I don't think any vendor would want their website searchable, as that would drive competition to the lowest priced seller and leave behind the rest. Even on Amazon there may be a dozen vendors for a product but most people don't even look at the other buying options.

Or Pinterest / Etsy

What exactly do you mean by that? Like different servers?

I'm a bit iffy on the idea, but not strictly opposed to it. How would scammers, returns, payment issues, etc be handled without a strong central authority?

Seems like a smaller, weaker local administration might not be able to handle such.

Legitimate curiosity on my end. I'm open to interpretation and suggestions.

I'm new to this federalized system in terms of social networks. It's been interesting so far.

Like separate websites and stores are like instances that list goods/services in the same system? Could be awesome but sounds way more difficult to implement.

I tried this as a startup (sort of) years ago. A privacy-friendly alternative to Amazon with an aim to bolster small, local businesses. Built the entire thing...nobody was on board. 3 months of development! Wasted!

Yes, but federation would have to be whitelist based.

I suppose it depends on how you define decentralized. I can't imagine some sort of Fediverse-like storefront, only showing sellers on "approved" servers/partners.

If, OTOH, you mean real, meaningful competition to Amazon, then I'm all in. Possibly something like Google Shopping, except good.

Didn't we have that before Amazon, and it was patchy, required lots of data entry with new accounts and dubious customer service? Amazon succeeded because everyone else was so bad, and now at least there's better payment handling options than random insecure sites storing credit card information in plaintext, but nobody else comes close to providing the range and convenience of Amazon.

Amazon isn't really a shop - it's a logistic company that also sells stuff.

So something like https://github.com/OpenBazaar ! Though it looks like they are moving forward with OpenBazaar 3.0.

I think that would be nice. It would hopefully allow meaningful search and filter. Trying to find spec comparisons on Amazon is terrible, they don't support exclusions, and they basically sort by ads