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.

  • demesisx@infosec.pubOPEnglish
    5·
    10 months ago

    Perhaps eventually, they’ll need to once the network effect takes hold.

    But I asked myself the same question. I think vendors could distinguish themselves by offering special deals to people who specifically sign up for their instance, a tiered membership plan, payed memberships, etc. Maybe exclusive items for members only.

    I’d be interested to hear more ideas but right now, that’s the gist of the benefits I can see. The other obvious benefit I can think of is the inclusivity of it all. If this idea took hold, it eventually wouldn’t be wise for vendors to abstain from using this service once customers are using it to find places to shop….and since it’s free, it isn’t something that businesses have to worry about like they do with other services like this that charge those businesses in order to list them.

        • CallumWellsEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Spell checking doesn’t help with that either, since it actually is a word. Though with the amount of people I see use “payed” instead of “paid” and the dictionaries being mostly descriptive instead of prescriptive (as far as I know) it’ll probably end up being a recognized conjugation (is that the right word?) of that version of “to pay”