NaibofTabr

Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping

This premise is not correct. As I’ve described, Amazon’s business is providing services to other businesses, many services, which make their platform attractive for sellers due to ease-of-use. Therefore…

Let’s make an amazon alternative.

This objective is not really possible. An alternative that does not provide all of those services is not actually an alternative.

Sellers need to sell there to survive

Amazon is a service provider. Sellers sell there because Amazon provides product advertising (every product page is essentially an ad), order processing, payment processing, warehousing, order fulfillment (via the warehouse staff), shipping, dispute resolution, return processing (which is its own logistics nightmare), and even resale of returned/refurbished products in some cases, and all of it is coordinated through their data systems.

It is extremely convenient to sell a product on Amazon because they handle all of the customer-facing parts of selling, all you have to do is describe what you’re selling, and arrange for Amazon to get the product somehow. It’s the convenience that keeps sellers on their platform. It’s the convenience that makes it worth the cost of doing business with Amazon.

Now yes, each individual service could be replaced, but splitting them out is going to cause coordination problems. It’s going to slow down the order fulfillment, and it’s basically shunting the operation cost (both time and money) back onto the seller. That’s going to mean fewer sellers interested in using the alternative, because now they have to do for themselves what they could simply pay Amazon a percentage of their sale price to do. And because this alternative is slower and can’t provide the same kind of return guarantees that Amazon can, fewer customers are going to want to use it.

The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else.

So yes, you’re right, but I don’t think you’re giving enough weight to what Amazon is as an organization. Amazon is a lot more than just the retail website. Having all of those services under one roof makes the operating costs lower, which is a big part of why the prices are so competitive. If the seller has to take on those costs then they have to raise the price of their products.

I think there’s some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.

AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon’s real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.

What you’re proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that’s hard to achieve without some centralized control.

There’s also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.

That can be difficult to accomplish…

If nothing else, the list of customers who were interested enough to spend money on such a product might be valuable to them.

ever since libraries have been a thing, the majority of developers have just used the libraries without really understanding what goes on inside them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — the entire point of abstraction is so that developers can focus on the stuff they need to get done while ignoring the already solved problems.

Nobody but nobody has time to know what’s in every library they might need to use. Who among us truly understands their network stack, all 8 layers?

senior devs have to spend all their time doing code reviews and editing and refactoring codebases that nobody else understands.

That’s OK we will just train AI to review and refactor for us! I’m sure everything will be fine.

Vulnerable code will be with us forever. The system will always be Swiss cheese. If you think you understand common mistakes, enough that you can review other peoples’ code for them, there’s work for you in infosec for sure.

And now for something completely different: https://youtu.be/ahnfLZKwnTg

I think you accidentally a word.

Do we want ‘mass adoption’? and if so, why? and what would that look like, if we had it? how would we know that we had got it, and what good would the getting do us?

hexbear (RIP)

Rest In Perdition

Beyond just the general tankiness that others have mentioned, I think the worst thing about Hexbear is how they aggressively claim to be pro-LGBTQ+ while zealously supporting Russia and China, nations which actively persecute anyone who is not hetero-normative. Putin actively jokes about killing homosexuals, and the PRC will black-bag you and put you in a reeducation camp.

I’ve always felt there was something deeply sinister in this hypocrisy, probably having to do with intentionally targeting marginalized people and attempting to influence and/or radicalize them - your basic cult recruitment tactics.

Heh, you think DNS is bad? Buddy, let me tell you about pig butchering…

Tell me you have no idea how DNS works without saying you have no idea how DNS works.

At least they stopped dumping the yellow pages on my porch every year…

The elders of the Internet?

No no no, see, DNS is bad, that’s the whole point. No touchy.

Can’t have any of that neoliberal stuff, gotta delete the hosts file.

Ah, you’re right, I should just look up IP addresses in my NAT table. Maybe I should add comments to it so I know which IP is which.

Well then you just take whatever you get, it’s website roulette.

See? If you don’t like DNS, you don’t have to use DNS, it’s not so hard.

And IPv6 won’t be that much harder, it’s only… uh… 32 hex digits you’ll have to remember, for each website. No big deal.

I mean… OK then just remember the IP addresses of the sites you use and don’t use the domain names?