How about a e-commerce site in the Fediverse where you can either sell second hand stuff (like ebay) or sell stuff you made or paid people make (like amazon or etsy) but with multiple instances with different moderation, shipment costs and some might require you to have id obviously their will be sketchy instances or users but the community could make a list of instances/users to avoid or to be careful of at least, and most the users on this list would be user who their instance hasn’t banned (which might put the instance into disrepute, since if they are notorious enough to land on this list you should probably ban them) and the people who are in charge of this list can get reports from user and they will have to conform from other buyers who bought from that individual to make sure people aren’t lying because they don’t like the person or something, it could be federated/integrated with services like mastodon, peertube and possibly lemmy where you can sign in with it with your account from these services, but you have to make an account with this service to actually sell anything, but user from these other platforms could link their shop on this service on their mastodon post and/or account and peertube videos/account (sorry if I got carried away), what do you guys think?
Ok here’s the pitch: instances generate currency for each of their users on a time registered basis or some other easily verifiable metric. Each instance’s currency is different and they automatically generate exchange rates with each other instance’s currency. People buy and sell items through it using only currencies generated by the federated platform.
Also all instances have to be co-ops or they get de-federated. Maybe the license even specifies this.
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Socialism
If you are going to encourage cooperatives, you would need one or more organizations that help people set them up. That way people can learn how to start their own, and what it takes to run one. There are legal considerations, such as taxes and registering the cooperative. And some people would need to learn accounting and leadership skills. This is all learnable, but if we want people to succeed, we would need to help guide them.
Yeah definitely. I’m sure some people in co-tech in the UK were working on something like this in a more generalised way a while back. They were running sessions for people on this for a while. Working with experienced orgs on this would be key.
Ideally each country would have a system which generates all the basic legal paperwork and a sound (if basic and intended for extension) constitution which encodes essential compliance requirements. Getting such a system verified may be easier said than done, however, especially depending on how co-op friendly the local regulatory environment happens to be.
Sounds interesting, but how would these currencies be translated into fiat currency (USD, EURO, YEN, etc.)? Because ultimately people need to pay for housing and food with their country’s chosen currency, and that is one of the main reasons why people sell stuff.
I’d say if anything it’s hard to stop people from doing so. It’d be trivial to set up an ad-hoc exchange (e.g. I’ll PayPal you money for tokens) for instance or simply resell items purchased with the tokens in a fiat market.
Thinking more strategically, I think the aim would ultimately to get things like this provided through our co-opy marketplace.
The question then becomes when does exchange into national fiat currencies become an issue: legally of course there’s money laundering concerns. I’m hoping that the continual regular and cheap issuing of the tokens would generate a somewhat inflationary environment (which is compensated merely through dealing with everything instantly and electronically with an exchange mechanism) which would head off speculation at least.
Then maybe there is some idea that there should be an exchange to fiat currencies which is also organised as a co-op, which could allow some governance to be put in place around it and then defederate from instances which allow ad-hoc fiat exchange (again to put in a speed bump for money laundering and criminal liability).