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?
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.