Lemmy, federation and activity pub have taken my brain to some weird places in these last few months.
What if the world had a federated, activity pub based, passenger transport and delivery app?
Anyone with enough tech literacy to have their own WordPress blog could also start their own local (as in, for their neighbourhood) instance of uber/lyft/doordash, effectively for free. Moderating and establishing quality and trust between customers and providers on their own communities.
Customers could use fronted like jerboa to add as many local instances as they’d like. Or drivers could subscribe to multiple sources of passengers. Or, anyway, networks between restaurantes, delivery and customers.
Some form of opencollective project/format could be use to fund development teams working on it.
I know it’s a huge endeavour. Can you please challenge my initial thoughts? Is the logic sound? What am I missing? Do you know of anything like it?
why should it be federated? I didnt heard of any restaurants that got blocked. I only heard about the crazy fees. Plus even Mastodon/Lemmy didnt solve how to easily manage your instance.
It should be, actually. In India, the two major players out there, Uber and Ola, pay really crappy wages to drivers, while stealing a considerable percentage of the price. This has lead to bad behavior like the driver bargaining the price outside the app, and if they are unsatisfied, then they don’t come for pickup. Sometimes, these drivers will stop the car mid-road. This forces the user to cancel the ride themselves, but this means that Ola and Uber will deduct changes from the user’s account. Honestly, I think that each instances will have to be geo-assigned by the taxi unions of the respective region.
Exactly! And I would expect taxi unions from different regions to generally cooperate to build a network of customers.
I think federation makes it easier for customers to circulate between regions and find providers for regions that their original platform doesn’t cover, using the same client. Or by adding multiple backends to the same client. They could trigger a single request for service in multiple providers, increasing the likelihood that someone will pick it up.
The fees would be defined by the operators. If an operator starts to gouge drivers/customers, it should be easy to kick them away and start a new one since the tech barrier and app barrier are removed.
I think the people working with the fleet, and service providers are the main stakeholder and the app has to be built for them. Customers are almost a second class citizen, in this model. For mastodon/lemmy, it is built for the end user first, which makes moderation tool lag behind too much.