My goal is to cut out the middleman and allow vendors to wrestle back control from services like Amazon. I work in the film industry where we watched our suggestions to studio heads get ignored.

To give you an idea of how I tend to think, years ago, my idea was this to solve the fragmentation/walled garden problem in video streaming:

• every company submits video content to a central store
• users can watch anything they want. They just have to pay a monthly fee
• that fee gets divvyed up to the companies that produced the media watched. Money only goes to companies that had content that was viewed and is a direct percentage of the monthly revenue of each user.

• Ideally you’ll need a stable identifier for each specific product. Most small online stores I use have product names riddled with typos, so a way to tackle that would be nice.

Ideally, I'd start in a budding industry, slowly building and iterating upon an industry stylebook for their retail items that can be iterated upon by all users who are able to submit merchandise. I’m thinking of a whole separate place where the structure of each industry’s API can be tuned and made polymorphic with related but different item types.

• What’s the data model? Would each store be an ActivityPub Actor? Like each one would have a username and publish inventory updates?

That's the current vision, though I could also see an ecosystem of incentivized crowd-sourcing of out-of-reach inventories. That's another idea I have concerning decentralized oracles but, if crypto tied into this retail thing eventually, a lot of the cool new technologies that crypto offers (digital identity, oracles, SPO's that operate alongside instances, and so, so much more) could certainly come along for the ride.

• Where do these updates go (maybe something akin to a Lemmy “community”)?

A lot like a Lemmy community but reformatted to work with inventories. Think of any web store. It could be identical to that but the data could be coming from multiple sources at once. I think there could be so many different possibilities for how this data could be mapped onto a front end that that I'd hate to pigeonhole this based on my preconceived notions....the flexibility might even be part of the beauty of this idea.

• If you’re just relying on stores’ self-reported stock levels, where’s the benefit of using a federated model? Could you just build an open source app that scrapes retailers’ websites and collates that information?

I was actually attempting to do that but then quickly came up with this idea instead because it felt like I wold be further contributing to enshittification in an entirely enshittified dystopian hellscape if I just did the same thing as everyone else again. So many other sites contain warchests of scraped metadata. Very few are truly egalitarian like the fediverse can be, IMO.

• Is the eventual goal that this competes with Amazon et al? I.e. it becomes an actual marketplace, perhaps with a “buy” and “sell” Action, and where vendors’ instances are effectively web stores?

Buying and selling features will be essential to draw people away from Amazon. Problem is, that’s one of the hardest probems to tackle in an elegant, dependable way. I can see similarities to OpenBazaar using a atomic wallets that accept any kind of crypto and convert it to any other....but I intend to spin this tech up with existing technologies to start.

That kind of scenario is exactly what cryptocurrencies were originally designed for. Too bad that didn’t work out and now they are mostly used by scammers.

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.

Thank you so much for your help. I’ll definitely look into it.

A few thoughts: true decentalization, as your article says, brings with it many requirements for trustlessness. That's particularly why I think that "instance operators" or the retailers listing the goods would be the only users with the permission to submit inventory items at first. That would solve the trust part of the trilemma until sufficiently decentralized technologies (crowd sourced oracles that list goods) are mature and understood enough to slowly and methoidcally be slotted in to replace them.

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.

Barter system?

I like OpenBazaar a lot but when people hear the words crypto, they run the other way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge proponent of crypto (I moderate a ton of crypto communities) but I just don’t think it’s necessary in this case. I think this idea doesn’t necessarily need incentivized computation or many of the amazing features that crypto could offer (which also introduce some tradeoffs as well). Of course, if this were to go 100% crypto-based, it would be a lot easier for me to spin up digital transactions and incorporate them to the system but for now, this idea is a bit more like OpenBazaar minus crypto and adding a bit of centralization and federation.

Thanks for the downvote. I can see you’re just here to be disingenuous.