I used woocommerce in the past. Its not that complicated. Woocommerce is open source from what I read: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/woocommerce-review/ i would have to check the source but implementing federation would be quite trivial i guess.

Why bother federating:

You advertise for your partners, not competitors. This is done already but manually by reselling. This would just expedite the process. The only part that is not yet clear to me is if the shop advertises something from another shop and clearly says, only sale processing through website, not fulfillment, if that would also make it that the legal warranty is done by the downstream vendor. Processing returns also is trivial from a technical perspective. Its just the legal one that keeps me guessing atm.

I agree on the need for legilature. I strongly disagree on the scam. You dont have massive csam on peertube either because it has manual federation. Everyone who runs a business knows that its much more important to not get sued than to sell stuff. Big difference between small businesses and large ones btw.

I agree on all points except the last. It is no problem to outlaw something and disrupting fediverse instances is no problem either. With websites that is a whole different ballgame because they are manifold.

As you said, it exists. You can just clone it from codeberg and run it. Here’s an article about it https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/

Good point!

The mall was still centralized and most shops didnt have their own place and a stall ij the mall but I can totally see where you’re coming from.

It might be a good idea to keep this in mind if this ever becomes reality and we need marketing ideas. :)

I think thats valid. You don’t have to accept or look at everything.

Do you mind sharing what your ideal society looks like? I think a lot of folks share common ideas but have vastly different labels for them.

I’ll go ahead:

I personally want to work. It can be fun. I want to do things I’m actually good at. I want to be able to afford food and housing. I want to know that i wont starve if I become sick or disabled. I want to be able to survive when I’m too old to work regularly. I want my family to be safe no matter what.

I think those are pretty understandable goals. I want to live in a world where this applies to as many people as possible.

Another win for peertube and owncast.

Let’s talk about this in a little more detail.

What do you consider going off the deep end? What do you consider leftist? Which ideas do you consider idiocy? What is your idea of a society worth living in?

I personally am open to any ideas that exclude discrimination of identity. For me the tolerance paradoxon applies.

I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Thank you for this friendly and encouraging offer. This goes a long way sowing trust. I feel a lot more positive about looking into it now. Have a nice weekend.

You’re missing that these points have already been adressed in a lot of other comments and have been stated way more constructively.

Of course having a whole logistics setup in place will be far superior to only doing dropshipping. But this is a whole different (additional) project. It absolutely has it is place. What I’m dismissing is the claim that the idea is dependent on somehow cloning the arguably much more expensive and complex parts of amazons business.

Again, i do agree that amazon has a huge machinery in place. But I also wish to discuss things without being treated dismissively myself.

I’m very happy you reveal your actual intent by personally attacking me instead of taking the hint. Good bye.

This is incredibly valuable advice! Thank you so much!

My current stance on federation is of course opt in and requires the main seller to trust the downstream vendors.

The main point is that this already happens for a large portion of thing you can buy. I sell computers and adjacent services, classical system integration if you will. Of course I have to buy the systems from vendors and resell them to my customers.

Many system integrators have shops where some of them rely on custom integration of vendor apis. Take minecraft server sites for example that have an automated integration with a hosting company’s api (eg hetzner). you as a customer just order a server, their automation makes the order processing with hetzner and provisions the server for you.

Now make this over a non custom but standardized api, eg activity pub.

I might still be overlooking stuff but from a technical standpoint this should be doable. The legal aspect is interesting, although I think this could be done similar to already existing resellers.

Feel free to point out flaws obvious to you. I appreciate your feedback massively.

Very much decentralized. Just with the caveat that payment decentrlization needs its own project. Successful foss software projects typically have a narrow scope and concentrate on them. Feel free to do the payment part in an adjacent project so that we dont have yo rely on stripe and paypal.

I wont correct you since I’m not the authority. I think your point is valid.

In my idea, the shop you visit - lets call them computer store - will sell you a range of computers, some of their own assembly, with normal margin, like its done today. What changes is that they partner with another shop (or many) that sell adjacent products. That could be a desk for the computer, software or other products. Those products are manually federated, ie the partners have been vetted by computer store. If you buy the computer, the seller makes their typical margin. If you buy the desk, no matter if additionally or exclusively, they will only manage the order process and payment. The rest will be done over classical dropshipping. Meaning the original desk seller will handle everything after the sale has taken place. Same as amzon does with many of their products, same as aliexpress and ebay but better than ebay because the computer store owner keeps control of the vendors they partner with. They receive a small fee only which would not be enough on its own but they arguably dont have any work besides processing the order.

Since this was another round of no additional input, I’ll repeat myself too:

People have already suggested that. But thanks for participating.

I fully agree that this would be a valid application. The reason any company doesnt adopt such strategies is the cost of pioneering it. Most companies who spearhead such an idea want it to pay off -> proprietary. Also most people are specialized in their industry. Developing an app is not native to food industry for example.

There you go. Glad you like it.

You obviously didnt get the point. These stores already exist and they’re not big.

I do get the specialization idea and I think its valid. i just dont see how to make that federated and why only for books as I’m not talking about a service, really. Its a network.

The point is moot. Social media is like a bar. Every bar has politics at some point. Its always been about frequenting the places you find endearing. Make a community that does not allow mention of politics, hell a whole instance. Block the words, defederate with anyone else. That should do it.

Glad you found something that works for you mate. Still, this corpo-soft-lock-in-shit isn’t cool man. I get it, you want it easy and reliable. But this aint it. The stuff I’m talking about here is kind of the middle inbetween local seller and wholesale chain store. Thats why I like the idea.