Possibly a dumb question, but is there, or could one of the extra smart people here build, a federated marketplace to allow for direct buying and selling without the middle-man enshittification of ebay, reverb, and the like?
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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There's a bit of discussion at the old place but it is defying my attempts to link to it (try Googling "Fediverse eBay" and you get a thread on r/Monero.
There's bitejo and there was OpenBazaar. It may be possible to take the code from the latter and bolt on ActivityPub. Or look at Bonfire's Value Flows.
It should be technically possible but it's everything else that would be a headache - how you'd operate without huge overheads or breaking all sorts of consumer laws, for starters.
@Emperor @MostlyLazy If the server doesn't process payments it should not cause admin a headache in most (?) jurisdictions.
Alternatively, one could focus on grey markets.
>Bitejo
By the way, Bitejo was planning to add federation, although now the future of the project is a bit uncertain. It might be added to Bitejo fork, as I suggested in this CCS: https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/395#note_21836
It depends on how it works - if you just want a small ads type thing where you are allowing someone to say they have a thing and another person to contact them to say they want that thing, then they sort it out between themselves, that should be fine (NAL). You could, presumably, advertise services as well as goods. There were subs that kinda worked like this and there may be communities on here doing the same.
It would work nicely as a Fediverse service - you could post an ad and reply through an account on another service (the quality of your account could act like your reputation), boost it elsewhere (like Mastodon) to presumably like-minded people, etc.
Adding bidding might be a pain as the service would be locking in an individual's commitment to pay (as opposed to letting them sort that out between them).