Is it possible to one day replace the privacy nightmare of Amazon with a decentralized merchant network? All I really use Amazon for these day is aggregate customer reviews by query, then buy the items as direct as possible. Why can’t respectable tools to this instead? I understand the cost, but could the tech be adopted?
Bookshop.org is an attempt to provide an alternative to Amazon as a bookseller by using a network of independent book stores. It’s not decentralized technologically or anything like that; it’s just a website that bookshops can affiliate with. But it does represent a model to build an alternative that other industries can learn from.