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.
It’s a protocol for like anyone digging in to it and post stuff.
If you don’t heavily secure who is talking to who, then any script kiddie can send “Choco tablets at 50 cents available in n Denver” anywhere.
You can use it, but as it isn’t made for inventory, you’ll have to do lots of things to circumvent things just to make it work correctly. Also, it’s not a proven protocol yet so it will maybe change, and then all your fixes goes out the window, or continue to work but just become unsecure, or wrecks havoc.
You should probably just go for a centralised (because you need control) protocol, like client server for example.
Cheers and it’s cool of you thinking up things!
It wouldn’t be used directly for transactions because that is (IMO) an incredibly unwise idea for a pub/sub protocol since there is zero privacy. That’s not what the pub/sub protocol was invented to do and I wouldn’t be crazy enough to try and make it do that.
I’m actually only proposing its use as an open standard to BROADCAST inventories and/or changes in those inventories. Those changes would only be allowed to be broadcast by authenticated parties to prevent too much data being sent out at once.
Each item’s metadata may contain links to the url of that item in the vendors web store/instance but it would never actually be used to directly execute a transaction. It’s like trying to get a train to fly. It’s just not designed for it.
The only decentralized payment technology that could or even should be paired with this technology would be a very robust cryptocurrency technology like Cardano, IMO. But I think it wise to work on the inventory broadcast aspect because crypto has such a bad reputation at the moment and I’d hate to mess with an idea while it is on the vine.
Well I told you why it’s a bad idea, but I feel you really want to use the tech so go ahead and good luck I guess!
I feel that you really don’t understand what I’m getting at.
I have 0 intention to use this technology to process or handle financial transactions.
I intend to use this technology to create an open standard for the
broadcast
of changes to an inventory.
They are two completely different but closely related things.