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.

So not just they pirated them, which may or may not be a crime and where I may or may not be impartial, but they are also leeches who would be banned on any decent torrent tracker of the olden days.

Generally speaking, when a much stronger party forces upon you a mechanism, it doesn’t work in your favor. Whether they call it free speech (for bot campaigns too, while you get banned) or moderation (your opponent insults you in every comment, and they are fine, but you insult them once - you’re banned).

The super weirdest thing is that people again and again believe that the strong party belonging to “their” side will do things right this time in history.

It’s cheaper and more dangerous, and usually done where natural gas is much cheaper than gasoline. Yes, explosions.

I love such headlines, as if every minute or every cycle don’t.

Admittedly my eyesight is in sad shape, but better than my mental state, so.

Security concerns usually don’t talk about themselves

That’s politics, all big companies do politics.

It doesn’t even make sense. One can have a voice bot with an LLM, if it’s so bad. One can ask if the customer wants to get an SMS with an URL to support page. Asking them if they want to be sent to operators after that.

But just 15 minutes basic wait so that less people would reach operators - why the hell, I don’t get it, how is it better than just waiting in queue when all operators are busy and not waiting when, well, not. If the operators are overloaded and perform worse - then allow bigger ACW times, more breaks, maybe hire more operators.

Especially for a computer hardware company one can script most support calls pretty unambiguously. They are not going to be helping out a grandma via phone when “Internet isn’t working”.

Not exactly aphantasia, though some kinds of imagination are close to that for me. Rather that something remote is very hard to imagine, while triggers, like sounds and smells and physical feelings and harmonic progressions, make something very easy to imagine.

So if I know that I have to do something or else my head rolls off, the deadline being in 3 hours, I won’t be as concentrated as the typical person.

Yeah, see, I even have a mental condition which should supposedly make that my problem more than that of most people.

I’ve seen your wrong opinion, but without arguments it’s useless.

Yes, about service problems and Steam - I understand why it happened, but sanctions on Russia causing my inability to not buy, but even find in store some games kinda affect it. One small nuance is that family members of those, well, making decisions in Russia are often in the western countries feeling themselves very well (including Steam games), and those who are not do not, I think, have problems dealing with this. And, btw, topping up your Steam wallet is possible, just via intermediaries with some additional expense.

OK, this is not about Steam, this is about sanctions efficiency.

EDIT: On the subject - I pirate MP3’s. I like having my music stored locally and not dependent on various services. I may start some day using some of those services, probably.

One can use natural gas (usually combined with some amount of gasoline). In terms of safety - if you’ve ever seen gas stations with concrete walls between fueling spots, that’s where this is popular, so not very safe.

Removed by mod

In some Star Wars book, of the period between PT and OT, there was a similar moment, but I don’t remember details. Context - it’s described as some slow transition, while the Republic of the Clone Wars had military censorship and many freedoms curbed, after the war supposedly ended and the Empire proclaimed, it legally and procedurally was mostly the same and the military limitations were in part lifted. So there were protests and attempts to use legal mechanisms, with such funny events.

13+ years ago when I’d say why I hate social media, cloud services, all this convenient dependence, everybody would act as if this was stupid.

My logic was that if there’s a mechanism allowing such influence, no matter how small, its power will grow almost until the death of such an ecosystem. Because the returns of abusing it will always be more than the expenses.

I don’t like this Cassandra feeling really.