this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Do you think it's worth building fediverse alternatives for transportation / distribution services? (reddthat.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by souperk@reddthat.com to c/chat@beehaw.org
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At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren't any so I started developing one on my free weekends.

While I haven't made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).

With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:

  1. What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
  2. What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
  3. What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
  4. What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it's dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
  5. What's the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?

Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.

Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it's now late o'clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.

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[–] souperk@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago

You could basically give drivers 100% of the profits minus hosting costs/development costs (dev might fall away depending on the model).

I would assume that drivers are hosting their own instance, and they get to decide both (a) how much they charge and (b) what portion of their profits they donate to the devs (especially modifications they need).

Money, ratings, reputation, identity stuff are all better solved with blockchain than with federation in my opinion. You don’t want to have to check the repuation of each instance, every instance might handle ratings differently etc… It would be a mess. Rather you’d want to only be worried about driver reputation.

I think this is already happening with taxi services. Here in Athens, there are a dozen of services you can call to order a taxi, and people (at least younger generations) are aware of most of them and use them depending on their preferences.

Also, another layer of passenger protection could be the instance they use. Instance admins could filter the driver instances they federate with, allowing only drivers with specific criteria. An issue I see here is that the federation criteria would be much more strict, potentially marginalizing people or making the barrier of entrance more difficult.