this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
461 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

48194 readers
868 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I know there are similar communities like !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net about finding products that you don't break after a year, and any number of buy<insert_country_here> communities. I'm looking for a community specifically for finding reputable products that aren't sold on Amazon, regardless of where the seller or buyer is, and regardless of the ethos of the seller beyond making quality products.

Edit:

There's also !deamazon@piefed.social, but that's more about general anti-Amazon sentiment than specifically helping steer people away from Amazon's online retail monopoly.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform

This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.

Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and "review" sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.

Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.

Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand's own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I'm honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.

It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

Really? You mean like other websites you buy from are secretly owned by Amazon?

So maybe there is more to discuss here than I thought.

Still I'm a big proponent of brick and mortar shopping. Or better yet, borrow from a friend or freecycle. So I rarely buy things online anyway.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 1 points 15 hours ago

They're not owned by amazon. They are using FBA (Fulfilment By Amazon)

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think they're owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an "Amazon Logistics US tracking number". I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don't know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.

There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they're outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I'm not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I'm willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

True that's the main reason I would shop online because some things can't be purchased otherwise. But I don't run into that super often.

Next time I'll pay attention to see if Amazon is involved in some way... I have been boycotting them for a few years now and would like to continue that as best I can. Frankly, with how awful their site has become I haven't missed it much.

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 points 19 hours ago

Well AWS is much harder to avoid that's true. I'm not sure how you can even tell if a site is working with them. Only way to be sure would be to never go online.