Interesting thought that's popped into my head since lemmy's population blew up.
These services are essentially individual sellers that all come together on a centralised platform provided by these sites to perform these services.
Aside from the logistics and distribution I see little reason why they can't be federated. Ebay could definitely be federated since individual sellers handle their own delivery, there is no ebay warehouse as far as I'm awar. Amazon on the other hand hold stock in warehouses making this considerably more difficult.
Amazon no. It's a massive, like national economy scale, centrally planned economy. That's largely what makes it work. I could see something like eBay working as a coop, but I'm not sure how it'd work as a decentralized platform. You want as much stuff as you can get on there to make it worthwhile.
Isn’t the centralization the primary thing that makes things like Amazon and Walmart so successful?
The giant retailers are the centrally planned economies of the 21st century and in some ways they're quite good at it.
Interesting.
I would normally fall back on using the already "centralized" structure of the assets and management of the corporation... but who says that the Soviet model is the only viable "socialism"? It isn't and we know this.
Hell, I would encourage people to think of socialism outside of what we see in China now and the Soviet Union back then.
Right? When you take Amazon's warehouses and distribution out of the equation, something that we know works anyway because people sell and deliver products without amazon, essentially these marketplaces are just software. Why can't they be open source and decentralised federations?
Why should socialists consider this? Because I think it would disempower large centralised market power and re-empower small traders who would be incentivised into organising into unions and coalitions among themselves to hold more power in the market. They wouldn't be on the side of proletarians of course (sole traders and artisans might be) but their activity would spice things up, causing all kinds of headaches for the state and creating friction is useful. It would look a lot like the organising among smaller traders in India that has so far successfully kept Amazon from taking market share in the country.
Not entirely related to this post but your comment just reminded me of this excellent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBFvxkvpi2w
One of the problems with decentralization is that it results in duplicative labor to do the same thing. Multiple people end up performing the same type of tasks which creates inefficiencies. Fundamentally it is one of the problems of “free market” competition is the “anarchy of production”, as David Harvey put it.
I'm not necessarily suggesting it could be efficient. My interest is more in whether it's possible and whether it could succeed.
The barriers to success in my opinion are whether or not sellers would make more money on it despite inefficiencies because they would be cutting out amazon as a middle man.
It's not the issue of logistics or distribution. It's the issue of quality control and customer service. Those are difficult to decentralize.
Before Amazon, ordering things online was a roll of the dice. Big brands had brick and mortar stores where you could buy, and stuff sold on the internet was from brands that weren't in brick and mortar, so it was a much more "risky" proposition.
If you bought something online from someone and you didn't like it, it was between you and the seller, and possibly your credit card company.
eBay and Amazon succeeded because they had policies that favored the buyers, not the sellers, and it was less painful than disputing the charge with your credit card company.
Honestly I think it used to be much harder to dispute charges on your credit card, since these days it's almost no-questions asked anymore for purchasers. I think the balance of power used to be more in favor of merchants before PayPal and other online payments came along and were more favorable to purchasers.
Definitely see a quality control issue. I do remember very clearly that Amazon's return policy being no questions asked was pretty much one of the major selling points of their success. Particularly because delivery is haphazard and often results in breakages.
I've wondered the same about federated door dash/Uber eats/Wolt/foodora
With all of these I see it as possible. The federation developers simply becomes the centralised planner. What exactly are any of these companies providing other than software to these "disrupted" markets?
If you can do their work with open source developers in a federation style approach you can completely kill off most of these companies without affecting the workers. It would return the profits that these companies are currently taking back to those workers.
Well that's the thing. Who is paying Dessalines and Nutomic? Nobody. Ideally people would donate or members of the federation with skills would contribute because it's important to their living or something, I don't have a clear or thought-through answer.
Hexbear/Lemmy is being developed as a passion project, yes there are donations but I doubt they are enough to sustain a living wage.
Most open source development is funded by huge companies who use it for their business.
If you are proposing an open source alternative to Uber/UberEats/DD/etc you aren't going to get people to give you their labor for free
The only thing I'm not sure about is if it actually helps anything, wouldn't we still see a few large delivery companies which compete over providing customer support etc? And the same race to the bottom on courier wages by competition
For example there still needs to be someone who gives a refund if an order goes missing during delivery
For taxis it would? I think. There's more complication in the ones with delivery. But the ones that are straight up 100% software problems like Uber can actually be replaced. I am actually thinking something similar to blockchain has a real viable purpose here (but not for currency/sales) because one problem you need to solve is reviews, and having the federation keep a ledger of reviews verified and maintained by everyone in the federation makes sense.
You'd still have the same issues that Amazon has about fake reviews. You would have to spend resources making sure the reviews for products/services are legitimate and not spam or paid reviews
