Open source taxi hailing and food ordering services, accommodation services that are genuinely open platforms are such a pipe dream of mine - on the one hand th

Open source taxi hailing and food ordering services, accommodation services that are genuinely open platforms are such a pipe dream of mine - on the one hand there is no reason why existing restaurants, delivery drivers and existing taxi services etc. can't broker their services. Hosting costs, moderation, payment processing and centralisation are major difficulties though. Legality and safety of providers are also significant. So while one side of my brain says - these services could offer and respond to requests in a federated system (akin to activity pub) where you can post menu feeds for example, and respond to requests for your food / taxi / accommodation in a requested location if it is available. The other half of me says - too expensive to host and build, time consuming to build, difficult to get providers to use your protocols, and then difficult to stay non-commercial - and difficult to work out how payments should be done, dispute resolution, reviews issues and the fact that probably the service would end up used to sell sex and scam people somehow because it almost always does... And I shrug and think: this is why we probably can't have nice things.