https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler

Or perhaps The Lightning Network?

(Yes, I know that TLN uses Bitcoin)

https://lightning.network/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

This is mostly just word-vomit, but I had a random idea while doing a tonne of Xmas shopping and figured you guys might appreciate possibly chewing on it.

What if there potentially was a Fediverse-style alternative / competitor to Amazon Prime, etc. but instead of being one giant marketplace (a la Flohmarkt, etc.), it was made up of independent websites that federate together?

Think something architecturally similar to Lemmy, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Loops by Pixelfed, etc, but:

No “instances” in the traditional sense (like Lemmy servers, Mastodon, instances, etc.)

Instead, each shop is its own fully independent website

(e.g.

Gotyka,

Dolls Kill,

Dracula Clothing,

VampireFreaks,

Killstar,

Hot Topic,

Barnes and Noble,

Home Depot,

Everlane,

Kotn,

Pact,

American Giant,

Taylor Stitch,

Outerknown,

plus other shops for books, electronics, home goods, etc.)

The federated layer wouldn’t replace their storefronts. It would just:

Aggregate listings / catalogs

Allow discovery, search, wishlists, maybe reviews

Potentially handle things like recommendations without centralizing power

Function kind of like a decentralized “market index” rather than a single store

In other words: a protocol + shared infrastructure, not a mega-store.

Some half-baked thoughts:

Users might sign in via each individual shop (or perhaps via a shared fediverse identity like ActivityPub / OAuth / something new)

Each store keeps control of branding, stock, payments, policies

The “platform” just connects them into one large, searchable, decentralized marketplace

No single Amazon-style choke point that can enshittify everything

I love this idea in theory, but realistically:

I don’t have the skills, knowledge, or time to build anything like this

I also don’t know if this already exists in some form (OpenBazaar vibes? Solid? Something ActivityPub-adjacent?)

This is more of a conceptual “what if” than a proposal

But the idea stuck with me because:

I hate how centralized Amazon is

I like how the Fediverse decentralizes control

And holiday shopping really highlights how fragmented yet monopolized online commerce has become

So I’m mostly curious:

Is this technically feasible with existing Fediverse tech?

Has something like this already been attempted?

What would be the biggest blockers — payments, trust, logistics, identity, incentives?

Would independent shops even want this, or would it be more attractive to smaller creators?

Is there a protocol or project adjacent to this idea?

This idea honestly came from Xmas shopping fatigue and bouncing between a million tabs, wishing there was a non-Amazon way to do “one stop shopping” without recreating Amazon itself.

Curious to hear thoughts, critiques, or “this already exists and you reinvented the wheel” responses.

Also, feel more than welcome to steal the idea.

EDIT:

Would something like Shops

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/shops/5354

work?

good for sharing off-fedi!

I recently came across three separate platforms:

Qortal: https://qortal.org/

ZeroNet: https://zeronet.io/

and

Plebbit: https://plebbit.com/

That all claim to be completely decentralized.

There's even talk about how Plebbit is more decentralized than the Fediverse, because the Fediverse is based off of instances.

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/s/0ynXzrD5H6

And I was curious, would such a setup work better for the Fediverse, or is it basically just a huge scam/waste of time and money?

Look, I think Ghost is a really great publishing platform. But after dogfooding their Fediverse integration for six months, I'm realizing there's still a lot missing. With their blog dormant, I'm left to wonder: is development still happening?

- Ive been spending alot of time driving lately and I heard again about the impending ban on social media for under 16yo children in Australia.

It made me wonder whether there is as opportunity/ use case for #ActivityPub based solutions that allow schools / community groups to offer accounts to their parents - that could be then used by those parents to offer moderated/ controlled child accounts (for their children).

Parent accounts would have vistability and potentially control over who child accounts can follow/conmunicate with. Schools could use it for communication with parents and/or pupils.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.

I stumbled upon this third party tool called Reddit Wrapped, and I was surprised that there isn't a Lemmy alternative / equivalent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditwrapped/s/svOtUNWyM2

BMX Escape is a very cool synthwave band that I really enjoy listening to. And as of yesterday they have a Mastodon account, which is partially because of me.

I wanted to post this question in a neutral community and not the specific Lemmy or Piefed ones.

I am curious to learn how resource utilization is comparing in the real world operation of Piefed vs. Lemmy instances, given a similar level of users and user activity? Considering that Piefed is written in Python and Lemmy is written in Rust, I would think that the difference would be significant, but I recall someone mentioning in the past that the main resource constraint for both these platforms would be database-related instead so the language choice wouldn't have much impact. I'm curious if this is proving correct in the real world as opposed to in theory.

I know that there are a few admins out there who are running both and I would love to hear their thoughts on this.

I personally don’t have the technical knowledge, time, or energy to take on something like this — but I was curious:

Since Matrix, XMPP, etc. already support most (if not all) of the features that Discord offers — text, voice, video, threads, bots, roles, federation, etc. — would it theoretically be possible to just replicate Discord’s UI and UX and build it on top of the Matrix or XMPP protocol instead of starting from scratch?

I mean, sure, there’d be some challenges with existing third-party clients, like

Matrix:

Element X,

Nheko,

Cinny,

FluffyChat,

XMPP:

Aparté

AstraChat XMPP Client

aTalk

Beagle IM

Bruno

Chat-O-Matic

Chatty

Conversations

Cheogram Android

but if developers and users agreed to focus on a stack — say, Matrix, XMPP, or both — couldn’t there a “Discord-like” ecosystem of compatible apps and communities?

Basically: could an open-source “Discord alternative” be built using Matrix or XMPP as the backend rather than trying to reinvent the wheel?

What are the technical or social barriers to doing that?

Mastodon 4.5 brings the long-awaited consent-respecting quote posts feature, as well as fetching replies from remote servers, and more customisation and moderation tools for admins.

Apparently there is an attempt for a federated alternative to Discord.

(I am not affiliated with Shoot in any way)

So, I don't know why I am doing this, but I was reading "Log Off" by Katherine Cross more carefully, after a short discussion here, and here. It seemed to me a good idea to have a post dedicated to this, and possibly in the future if this works out, about other books. The book is dense, and highly relevant to Lemmy and broadly Fediverse culture, and it spells out nicely some things I had thought before, but in much more packed and well thought-out way. I found myself highlighting something on virtually every page. So I guess I would like to post my thoughts on these highlights and see what other folks think about those as well. So here goes. I am posting the quotes as separate comments to this post, to facilitate them being discussed more thoroughly.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.asudox.dev/post/1072929

Just gathering ideas.

I know this isn't directly Fediverse related but in these unprecedented times it's important to use our platforms to protect the countless innocents getting kidnapped by the government.

It's also important people on Bluesky are aware of the best place to renort ICE activity.

This map is run by a nonprofit & oderators verifying reports 24/7

The ice map now allows for notifications to be set up around a user selected location.

This is helpful not only for people at risk but also for good samaritans trying to intervene.

You will be alerted to any reports within the radius you select.

Please spread the word and stay strong!

I’ve been thinking about discovering underappreciated Lemmy instances. GitHub’s awesome-lemmy-instances used to serve a similar purpose, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time, and I haven’t found anything else like it.

I got the idea from this post about finding decentralized communities in the Fediverse. I’m thinking of a Lemmy bot that tracks Lemmy instances, calculates the average number of active users and standard deviation, and identifies instances with activity below the average plus two standard deviations. It would then rank these underutilized instances by performance metrics like uptime and response time, and periodically update a curated list on Lemmy to guide users toward instances that could use more participation.

I'd love feedback on how you would go about doing something like this. And specifically how to rank by performance.

I have a need to create a new account on mastodon, but I am not familiar with the different instances and servers.

I'm looking for an up-to-date, comprehensive list of all ActivityPub federated platforms, sorted by the total number of monthly active users across all instances. Similar to Fediverse Observer’s list but for platforms instead of instances using the platform. Does anyone know of one?