there is a recent controversy of steam taking money from game creators. 30% of sales to be exact. At first, I thought that was normal since every other companies do this. then I realize I was getting to used to them, people are dependent on them and the trend is becoming normal.

So what we need now especially with people being banned left and right is becoming independent.

What it is (?)

A self-hosted. Social. and Digital-only webstore. similar to itch.io. but because It’s federated, the social aspect of it unlocks the possibility to create a patreon-like replacement.

Examples of digital things you can sell;
  • Games.
  • Game assets (3D models, BGMs, images, etc.)
  • Books.
  • Movies.
  • Art
  • Digital Commissions/Micro-jobs
Why federated?

the whole internet will become that way and secondly It’s a way to have a patreon-like platform replacement.

But how do you sell it?

uhh, work. and upload it to your platform. you don’t need to do much as It’s digital-only.

How it’ll handle payments?

You can rely on Stripe and CoinPayments to cover the payment processing. also the developers will just focus on creating the platform. both Fiat and Crypto so most people can buy it around the world.

maybe later there will support selling physical items. but for simplicity’s sake because this hasn’t even existed in the first place, just do digital.This if ever launched, will be the first project to solely focus on monetization.

  • smallcirclesM
    4•3 years ago

    Love that this idea is brought to the table for a brainstorm. Entering the fedi with a solution like this (money involved) will be high-impact, so there’s lotsa things to consider.

    I will just mention some things that randomly pop up in my head :)

    • Digital-Only: Seems indeed the best restriction to ‘keep it small and simple’ (KISS) initially.
    • Payment: I wouldn’t tie the store to any payment mechanism, but instead provide a Payment Provider interface.
      • Keep independence here. Stripe is a great, complete service, but it is also already a problematic centralized walled garden. Cryptocurrencies still have to prove themselves.
    • Offers: Offering something to someone else (for sale or otherwise) needs a level of standardization.
      • Easiest to make this app-specific, but it would defeat the Interoperability that fediverse offers. Ideally we want different app providers to be able to ‘compete’ in this space, yet be able to showcase offers from other apps, and consumers at all times able to freely choose an app / instance.
    • Aggregators: A naive implementation runs the risk of dominant aggregators to arise. Special care is needed to avoid that.
    • Profit: By introducing ECommerce / Webshop to fedi, we open it up to a domain with clear revenue models.
      • Not good or bad per se. But with this we introduce clear profit motives to app development and it will change the dynamics on the fediverse.

    On Payment and Offers some references:

    • DigitalBazaar is working in this space, and they take a wholly open standards-based approach. See e.g. PaySwarm and W3C WebPayments Working Group.
    • Hyptis is part of Spritely Project by ActivityPub spec co-author Christopher Lemmer Webber. All the sub-projects of Spritely are slated to become part of the future of fediverse, so very interesting to take into account.
    • Delightful Funding is a curated list of all kinds of open payment and funding-related resources I maintain. Should do a lot of editing still, but interested to track all kinds of payment schemes (except cryptocurrency, atm).

    Finally a thought related to Aggregators. I feel that best way to implement this, is based on ‘hybrid decentralization’ i.e. with both federated and peer-to-peer (P2P) nodes on the network. Ideally the Shop should live entirely on the client as a personal thing, while server instances are only involved as ‘switchboards’ matching supply and demand.

    There’s various research underway to support P2P on the Fediverse (notable is DREAM community here), and also for individuals to retain control of their personal data (notable is Solid community here).

  • poVoq
    3•3 years ago

    Hubzilla has a marketplace extension that more or less does what you want. But a dedicated option might be better.

    The problem is a bit that people have come to expect a sort of build in backup function where they can download a version of their digital asset any time instead of storing it on their own hard drive all the time.

    Furthermore a central store, or one that allows external sellers like Amazon still acts as a sort of trust worthy intermediary, while on a purely federated store fraud might become rampant very quickly.

  • @Gwynne@lemmy.mlOP
    1•3 years ago

    I thought of it only as a federated games store. but that would be limiting the possibilities we have and will complicate things in the future. Also instances exist so there will be a Game Store instance, (E-Books Instance, and many single user instances.)