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.
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.
Who pays the open source developers in this scenario?
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