Economics in the Fediverse: Building Marketplaces and Other Possibilities

Topics Funding models Sectors & use cases

Convener: Samuel Brinkmann (@sabrinkmann@hachyderm.io)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Jeremiah Lee (@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold)
Julian Fietkau (@julian@fietkau.social)
Philipp Riederle
Michelle Hughes (@MegaMichelle@a2mi.social)
Cagan Mert Islek (@cagan@cmislek.me)
Moritz Jäger (@genius7@mastodon.social)

Website: https://codeberg.org/54GradSoftware/economiverse

Notes

How does the social stuff that ActivityPub is proven for interact with the economiverse?
- Same platform, same UI, FEP-based integration of vocabulary for economic transactions (Valueflows)
How can trust be established in decentralized marketplaces? Compare with big centralized online marketplaces that do a lot of fraud prevention.
- Something like a web of trust could be a partial answer (endorsements)
- Specialized marketplaces for tightly knit communities
Labels/certificates, potential for BadgeFed integration
Payment: FEP only covers communication and negotiation, actual payment currently has to happen off-protocol
Why not integrate with blockchain currencies?
- Monero functionality in Mitra as an example
- There are downsides wrt efficiency/cost, also how big is the market share of cryptocurrency among the general population really?
- There are no avenues for digital payments that are truly convenient
- Different opinions on the extent to which this is worth exploring
Shopify is currently building something similar for that but not with fediverse but just closed with
Jeremiah: Related projects of interest:
- Hop Sauna: a federated marketplace framework
  - https://community.interledger.org/hopsauna/hop-sauna-a-social-marketplace-framework-introduction-and-roadmap-2p9b
  - https://codeberg.org/whythawk/hopsauna
- Mastodon’s Fediscovery project https://www.fediscovery.org/ for enabling discovery/aggregation of Activity Stream objects. Could be used to aggregate products from many sellers that can be searched in a single access point by a potential buyer.

Open Network for Digital Commerce: https://ondc.org/

Concerns about EU regulations (DMA) for if you operate a marketplace, you have to comply to verify sellers. Samuel wants to have a good UX that involves some centralization in terms of passing off user info. Doing just discovery and not being part of the transaction as an intermediary would avoid the DMA issues.

Jeremiah: Could EU Digital Identity Wallet for payment initiation solve the UX concern and allow you to not be an intermediary? https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/935397429/Payment+Authentication