a) You’ve never run a business

They might have run a small business or been present in a bigger one in management position, doing their own job well enough to avoid painful understanding they don’t get it as a whole. Arrogance is not always cured by experience, actually I doubt it’s ever cured in humans and we all have it.

b) you’re more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.

That much was clear from the very beginning, I tend to have such ideas too, but I have BAD and thus mania periods.

how to process payments? how to ship goods? how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?

The problems are solvable, but the solutions taken together are couple times as complex as Amazon itself. This translates to cost. Which is naturally the reason Amazon came to existence earlier than that solution.

I think that layers of storage\messages and actual logic should be firmly separated, an instance going down when someone wants a refund for an operation that involved it seems not good enough. If the operation is a cryptographic contract with an escrow, and “instances” are just servers providing message storage probably privileged for some users (might be members of a community, might pay for that storage, that’s lower layer anyway), this is less of a problem. But that’s not a federation.

By the way, however I dislike OP’s attitude, if you suggest this idea like a federated ads and reviews platform, it becomes useful.

Since this was another round of no additional input, I’ll repeat myself too:

I don’t think so. I also can imagine you moved on to ethical business and suggesting ideas because you had personality conflicts where people actually do something.

Sorry if my tone will be less gentle than needed.

Your comment brings no ounce of new ideas or criticisms to the table,

I don’t think so.

overlooks all the pros and cons already mentioned

It makes sense that others look at different parts of the problem than you do.

I run businesses for 15 years, do ethical business since 10 yrs and am thinking from a position of experience.

Most people have (or recently enough had and will have) a job, and most people know a person or two with 10-15 years of experience in management positions who think they are thinking from a position of experience.

Different professions and job responsibilities exist for a reason.

The reason I dont present myself in a way that screams competence is because this is lemmy and we dont need this stuff.

You did it here instead of continuing a pretty normal thread or leaving it be.

I like spitballing ideas and push new projects for the benefit of the people.

That is important, but almost everyone has been spitballing ideas and pushing new projects since they learned to speak.

But feel free to suggest constructive things.

Quoting myself:

Getting back to logistics - one has to design a system of shared warehouses, transportation, mailing and delivery tasks, tracking, reporting on outcomes of every event, and all that should be even more abuse-resilient than the processes inside actual Amazon. You’ll have Byzantine problems in every interaction.

“Shared” is the important part. Even without that one can fail logistics - see USSR, the biggest corporation to fail in history.

No, federated model is chosen over distributed model or centralized model to allow feuds, putting it simply.

That may work for a Reddit alternative, but doesn’t work for markets. Helps moderation (some idea of it, I don’t think that idea is good), but definitely hurts a single space to sell and buy stuff.

Which is why cryptobros and such types make either centralized or distributed systems.

So much for using computer networks for this.

Now about Amazon specifically - your post omits the whole warehouses and logistics part. Which is most of Amazon’s core business.

Computer people today somehow started forgetting that real life is very hard and complex. When I was a kid (born 1996, so not old man), computers had a promise of making that real life easier, and from time to time delivered on it, but at some point bullshit like glossy buttons and Web 2.0 and social media became a thing in itself, and everyone started behaving as if it’s done, we now can look down like olympic gods to those mortals messing around in dirt, and sometimes easily solve their problems. We can’t.

Getting back to logistics - one has to design a system of shared warehouses, transportation, mailing and delivery tasks, tracking, reporting on outcomes of every event, and all that should be even more abuse-resilient than the processes inside actual Amazon. You’ll have Byzantine problems in every interaction.

The “distributed king of all social media, solving once and for all the problem of centralized platforms” that I’m often dreaming about is realistic compared to that.