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Has Anyone Ever Pulled Off Federated Inventory? (infosec.pub)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

You make a great points…and I’m actually a Communist…but I’m a starving communist.

I am a software engineer who has been out of the film industry on comp for the past 6 months (broke my foot on the job). I have been teaching myself Haskell and Purescript because that’s what I like. Anyway, I had this idea because I couldn’t find any products I was looking for locally. I came up with this because I didn’t see what I wanted as a consumer.

I can either go back to work breaking my back, hauling feeder cable for the film industry or I can create something that helps wrestle control away from Amazon while also making me some money. I’m sorry that I live in a capitalist society but I do. Also, I think you might agree that I could have gone ultra-greedy with this idea but I carefully considered enshittification (that we see time and again when greedy bastards look for profit motives) and decided to try and spin up a free and open source system to wrestle control away from assholes like Amazon etc WITHOUT those same enshittification factors built in.