How about a e-commerce site in the Fediverse where you can either sell second hand stuff (like ebay) or sell stuff you made or paid people make (like amazon or etsy) but with multiple instances with different moderation, shipment costs and some might require you to have id obviously their will be sketchy instances or users but the community could make a list of instances/users to avoid or to be careful of at least, and most the users on this list would be user who their instance hasn’t banned (which might put the instance into disrepute, since if they are notorious enough to land on this list you should probably ban them) and the people who are in charge of this list can get reports from user and they will have to conform from other buyers who bought from that individual to make sure people aren’t lying because they don’t like the person or something, it could be federated/integrated with services like mastodon, peertube and possibly lemmy where you can sign in with it with your account from these services, but you have to make an account with this service to actually sell anything, but user from these other platforms could link their shop on this service on their mastodon post and/or account and peertube videos/account (sorry if I got carried away), what do you guys think?
The problem would be payments though since you probably don't want the instance admins handling your payment info. Maybe it could work more like craigslist though where payment is up to the buyer and seller to figure out, but that has its own problems. It does seem like it would be useful though if there was a way to make it fairly safe
Unfortunately centralized (but I don't think it's possible to do that with the traditional banking system due to gateways) but it's actually very easy to integrate with Stripe.com , as you to integrate yourself might be a day of work at most (source : I did few integration with WebXR as prototypes) but if you, as a self-hosted admin of the platform instance, just want to make it work, you probably only need a working account (to receive the actual money) and you'd fill up only IDs and voila, working.
Now there is also the KYC challenge, not sure how that work as a platform intermediary. Honestly at that point, as someone else suggested with Belgium 2ememain.be better letter user handle that themselves and in Europe with IBAN it's pretty trivial to pay online, no fee.
Might also be worth exploring https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API
In Belgium we have 2dehands. Not perfect or open source but miles better than Facebook marketplace.
No payments go through the platform. People meet in person and use cash or use a bank transfer or 3rd party payment like payconiq to buy and sell things. It works perfectly.
Not everything has to have an integrated shopify style payment platform. Most of the population is perfectly capable of exchanging money.
Ok here's the pitch: instances generate currency for each of their users on a time registered basis or some other easily verifiable metric. Each instance's currency is different and they automatically generate exchange rates with each other instance's currency. People buy and sell items through it using only currencies generated by the federated platform.
Also all instances have to be co-ops or they get de-federated. Maybe the license even specifies this.
????
Socialism
If you are going to encourage cooperatives, you would need one or more organizations that help people set them up. That way people can learn how to start their own, and what it takes to run one. There are legal considerations, such as taxes and registering the cooperative. And some people would need to learn accounting and leadership skills. This is all learnable, but if we want people to succeed, we would need to help guide them.
Sounds interesting, but how would these currencies be translated into fiat currency (USD, EURO, YEN, etc.)? Because ultimately people need to pay for housing and food with their country's chosen currency, and that is one of the main reasons why people sell stuff.
Lots of sites offload payment directly to stripe, PayPal, etc. many even let you choose the provider. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work the same way.
Honestly a decentralised craigslist would be great.
there could be a centralised payment system that all instances have to use
Yeah, not going to happen.