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My brain just thought the words "Etsy but ActivityPub"

Basically just - do ActivityPub, add a shopping cart, and try to manage the bots - so you can have art and craft and so on focused instances with sales inside them. I... have no idea how to make this work non-evilly.

silverwizard
silverwizard  

Scaling has a bad rap as a concept - but lets think about scaling.

There was an Urban Dead clone back in the day called Nexus Wars - it had a rule for player suggestions called "Multiply by A Billion". "If we give out one of these buffs a day, this means that the best clans will have 4-5 of these in a week. Assume that it's going to be involved in most to every interaction."

There was an idea in early MTG that rare cards wouldn't appear at most tables. There might be one in a deck at the table, but it's a rare, most people wont have one.

This is two different games talking about scaling.

silverwizard
silverwizard  

But ok - if you want to *scale* activitypub with commerce - this means that the question is one of community.

Building a community with a store is really fucking hard. You have all the problems of Ebay, Etsy, and Twitter. This means building spaces like systems for Art, Writing, or whatever. And that means supporting those people. This means figuring out how to discourage advertising and brands, while supporting people who create.

I don't think this is a needle I can personally thread. I should not try.

But someone should. We should try to figure out how to do capitalism without as many siphons in the middle, at least until we can get rid of capitalism.

silverwizard
silverwizard  
This brought to you by me thinking about Etsy and its problems - and how I want to find *creators* first, and then wares, rather than wares first and then creators (at least most of the time)
silverwizard
silverwizard  

Fuck

I just realized that this is literally OnlyFans in a lot of ways. A social network for following creators who can sell things to you easily.

And course that - that immediately got moved toward Sex Work because that's the most tech savvy and mobile group, but I think there's something valuable here.

Jay Hannah
Jay Hannah  
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Isn’t the hardest part going to be the payment system integration, and accounting? And shipping costs across dozens of possible shipping options? All the little quirks like charge-backs creating credits/debits? Or is your system going to attempt to not middleman dozens of payment systems? In which case you still need to API integrate to lots of different options and still do accounting for every worst case scenario?
Jay Hannah
Jay Hannah  
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I’d guess creators/wares is the “easy” part?
silverwizard
silverwizard  

@Jay Hannah So in this case we're looking at small vendors - so this means that you're probably looking at:
Shipping is going to be integration with the local postal service
API integration with Stripe/PayPal/whatever is pretty simple
If you want to directly take payments that's PCI DSS and also other stuff

But that's all technical detail. I'm not saying it's nothing, but it's all mostly solved problems with very common answers. But the "build a community based on selling without being a hellhole" is not even slightly solved.

@Jay Hannah
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