26
Amazon Replacement?
(sh.itjust.works)
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 !moderators@lemmy.world!
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
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.
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").
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.
Damn, that's a good point. I have no technical coding experience or knowledge (so no one should take what I'm about to say seriously), but I was picturing a lot of scripting pulling information across the web from selected vendors. Maybe that could prevent something like that? Or maybe I'm just making myself sound naive and stupid?