i haven’t visited your site yet, but i’ve long thought something in this vein has been missing.
imagine if taxi companies could make use of it, or a group of friends could start their own GNUber.
or a group of high school kids who want to deliver groceries/items to the elderly as volunteer work.
or a bunch of middle school friends wanted to do a lawn mowing service.
or…
of course, anyone in the industry knows how many unpredictable pitfalls reality will throw at it, but we also know very well these kinds of ideas, if followed through can be remarkable and truly can change the world.
it’s been like tiny little pinpricks at me for years that apps like Uber, Lyft, door-dash, etc… don’t have a scaled down open-source alternative — a decent Configure, Describe Services Offered, Spin-Up-An Instance and Go.
i’ll take a look later today when my schedule loosens up.
edit: just reread your post and looked at the comments, i misread what you were doing, sorry bout that. still sounds interesting tho, good luck!
People are going to hate on me, but web3 makes this absolutely trivial to build. If you try to build this as another centralized service, you just end up in the same place but a new dominant owner.
Don't get me wrong, there IS a wrong way to build this in web3 where it's just a web2 service on-chain. But designed correctly, it can avoid the pitfall.
ps. I built the original Amazon. On top of that, I have a brother who builds web-stuff related to decentralized coordinated activities and has done for many years. I didn't check in with him, but I'm pretty sure that we both think that you're insane.
I try not to. But when someone claims that building a platform for distributed, cooperative, coordinated action is "trivial", and it's in the context of "I'm building an open source Amazon", it is a little hard not to fail at this goal.
I used to work in large scale eCommerce too, I would never claim distributed supply chains is trivial. But this was not in reply open source Amazon, this was a reply to the idea of a distributed Uber (the parent comment to mine).
That to me, feels quite in line with Web3's capabilities. The hard problems to me don't seem to be technical in nature. I think the bigger hurdles will be business related. But this is a tech conversation, so here is my thoughts.
The way I see it, Uber enables 3 primary capabilities, for which it takes a major cut, and commands total control over drivers:
1. Driver Ratings
2. Payments
3. Match Making
I think web3 can solve 1 and 2 on-chain using smart contracts relatively simply. and if you use a chain like Avalanche, it can be done with low fees (cents) and with fast transaction finality (seconds).
The match making capability should not be on chain. For that i'd design a simple rest API using traditional technologies that consumes configuration from the chain. This service can be deployed on Akash, and paid for by taking a small cut off each transaction or devaluing a utility token... i'd build a DAO to govern the whole thing, and i'd distributes votes based on activity in the drivers pool.
Are there probably problems here? yeah, this is 3 minutes of thought. But i'm sure if I cared to, I could design a functional system in a weekend.
imagine if taxi companies could make use of it, or a group of friends could start their own GNUber.
or a group of high school kids who want to deliver groceries/items to the elderly as volunteer work.
or a bunch of middle school friends wanted to do a lawn mowing service.
or…
of course, anyone in the industry knows how many unpredictable pitfalls reality will throw at it, but we also know very well these kinds of ideas, if followed through can be remarkable and truly can change the world.
it’s been like tiny little pinpricks at me for years that apps like Uber, Lyft, door-dash, etc… don’t have a scaled down open-source alternative — a decent Configure, Describe Services Offered, Spin-Up-An Instance and Go.
i’ll take a look later today when my schedule loosens up.
edit: just reread your post and looked at the comments, i misread what you were doing, sorry bout that. still sounds interesting tho, good luck!