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Is there / could there be a federated ebay?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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A federated ebay is basically impossible. For that you would need real time communication between different instances. Otherwise people on the sellers instance would have an advantage in winning the auctions, defeating the purpose of making it federated in the first place.
It wouldn’t need to be that way — if everyone puts in their max bid at time of bidding, the seller’s instance keeps that secret until the auction clears, and then waits for all bids to clear at the end and picks the highest, you would get the correct outcome.
Meanwhile in the middle the current bid price might be out-of-date by some minutes.
Auction sniping would not work but idgaf about that for sure.
Trust in the seller’s instance seems like it would be the hard part.