Buying from an alternative ecommerce site usually sucks: you have to register for every website, enter your address, payment information and other information, they may leak data or store it improperly, you may not know the reputation of the website or business, you can’t easily compare products with other vendors and more. Amazon and ebay offer a centralized good experience and you know you can trust them with your purchase. They benefit the consumer by aggregating many businesses so it fosters competition lowering prices but they have so much power and they have done some anti consumer moves. Their fees could also be a problem. The same way mastodon offers a viable alternative to the deadbird platform and slice power to small instances while getting a better user experience. (And lemmy to Reddit.) A fediverse version of ecommerce could perhaps be viable: federated ecommerce that aggregates small business shops, handle the user details and let the business access it when you hit buy. Activity pub to communicate the listings and purchase orders. I am not a programmer and don’t know the technical implementations of it. So what do you think?
Decentralized marketplace will just look like Craigslist and Facebook and other classified marketplaces; chock full of spam and scams.
Adding some element of democracy (like voting on posts) could maybe improve both those marketplace sites.
I think it would improve any site really. Imagine how much better Instagram or Facebook would be if one could downvote stupid shit and the posters would see what people actually thought about their posts/comments. But that might lead to sads, and therefore less active users, so they won’t allow it.
Democracy is pretty cool though imo.
When money is on the line, I promise you it will be gamed.
There is a guy who interviewed me for a freelance gig, who generates new dropship e-commerce sites a day, for the past few years. He has over 2000 sites. He wanted help creating bots to have conversations and pump his sites on social media.
He was going to pay me well. But the skillset required was out of my expertise.
The Federation would provide a great tool of figuring out the best way to build trust. A reputable server will only let people join if they are in some way reputable. Servers that let scammers flourish will become defederated. If course servers have to be comparable in size. If there’s one server with 90% of users it doesn’t work that well.