Technology

If you love the Chinese low quality drop shipped items on Amazon, and wish that was the only thing they stocked, then Temu is great!

I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible, but good luck doing anything online and avoiding AWS.

The thing is, it doesn't save money to shop there, either. 90% of what you see is Amazon Marketplace, where you're just paying people to dropship you trash from Aliexpress

As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.

It's not that they are really bad, but I don't like monopolies.

I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.

Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it's closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.

In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they'll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.

That's because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),

I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms' inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it's impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP's no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn't quite the thing.

The platforms emerged because it's bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there's not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.

So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn't reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.

For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:

1. Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.

2. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like "buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K". Or same for selling on a service you host.

3. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.

Shit, I wrote this again.

Hell, I guarantee there are Lemmy instances running on AWS.

Know the struggle, just keep trying local stores or other sites first, maybe we can be a small part of change for the better ;)

www.Camelcamelcamel.com for all your Amazon price comp needs.

Prices mysteriously go up about a week before prime day sales, then drop to a few dollars below normal, scream “39% off” and you feel like you beat the system.