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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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[–] hitwright 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I have had the exact same idea, ever since I found out about fediverse. It's just difficult to find ways to trust of the network. Never managed to think of a way for easy self-moderation. Money does bring an insane perversion to try and game the system.

I'm guessing the federation part if done correctly with moderation might bring more trust to the network. Since this is an idea about physical commerce, I'm guessing that having a "store" gps location could be useful for partitioning the network node search priority. Highest chance that you would like to buy from your neighbour and not from across the continent first. Otherwise with the amount of items that will be scanned is nightmare-ish.

Somewhere in the comments there is a mention about dropping crypto as a source of trust. If the store needs trust of a user, it doesn't sound unreasonable to have your national identity there.

Other source of trust and identity, could be friends. It's easy to trust direct friends and friend of friend. Knowing that it most likely will have up to 5 jumps, that could be a way to "check" if you are trusted on the network. That does bring the bootstrapping problem

Hope my ramblings will be somewhat useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I’m guessing my idea is slightly different because I had been considering tying crypto to Lemmy then a bunch of people talked me out of it and I sort of agree (one guy mentioned the cobra effect then walked away and I was like 😧…he’s right). Crypto doesn’t always need to be tied into everything though e-commerce is an obvious one. There are so many issues with crypto though: for one, which technology would you choose? Because I would choose Cardano and immediately that would ignite some tribalism where someone else thinks it needs to be on an ERC-20 token or a DAO or both.

Even though I am an actual DApp developer, I’d rather create the pure technology to allow vendors to broadcast their inventories and create small pockets of vendor alliances in the form of a multi vendor instance with membership perks. I intend to try my small, less ambitious, non crypto idea in niche, budding industries to gain network effect.

Also, I’d think DID’s would corrupt the system even more since which central arbiter is chosen has a centralizing effect, anonymity goes away, trustless payments become optional rather than by default, and governments can use that information to track someone. Maybe my approach is to take it one step at a time and yours is to completely strip out all technologies for decentralized ones. Again, I sincerely love crypto but I want to make sure the simplest part of my idea is the focus for a minimum viable product.

The GPS coordinates thing is certainly a good point.

I think it could be a lot like the other fediverse apps where the front end of the app is actually where the distinction often lies..which is up to independent app devs to innovate on.

I’d be creating my MVP for small, local, budding industries to help work out the kinks in preparation for something as vast and comprehensive as the vision you have is. Also, I’d think, since it can be niche products and industries at first, perhaps inventories could be batched based on (as you say) geography, type, industry, etc. You certainly wouldn’t want a firehose of every Lemmy community and perhaps this would be no different. It’s all in how you consume it, I’m guessing.

[–] yokonzo 1 points 10 months ago

Barter system?