Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 10:17
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This sounds nice - when i’m done with getting my life back in order i’m gonna start selfhosting for real, and this goes onto the “to implement"-pile! (i just realized that the pile is getting pretty large)
I wanted to set up a kubernetes cluster and bought 2k worth of hardware, which ended up wasting away in a box for 3 freaking years. I would occasionally get it out on a free weekend, waste 10 hours and then give up cause I had more fun things to do on a weekend. Every time I attacked the project, I had to start from scratch because of updates and me forgetting everything by then. Months passed, then years.
Eventually I abandoned the idea of kubernetes and just set it up a single node with dokploy and the next time I felt like it I added another node in swarm mode and so on.
reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Oct 16:00
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Holy shit, sorry to hear. Hope you found some kind of use for all that hardware.
(sorry for constant edits, check the updated version)
reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 02 Oct 16:25
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Lol, no worries. Glad to hear it didn’t all go to waste.
ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Oct 12:29
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Having spent a good amount of the last several weeks working on several self hosted things,I would have to agree. Simple projects shouldn’t take long… But some shit happens.
When something is done and working, it is satisfying.
AceBonobo@lemmy.world
on 02 Oct 10:20
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By default Flohmarkt recommends to set a location and only federate with instances in a certain geographic distance. So if you only see far away ads, then you are either using the wrong instance or the instance is misconfigured.
It should support both. On the instance side to limit a region/country matching the instance, then client side to set your actual reachable area.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 11:57
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Because we are talking about physical items.
The distance I would go to pick something up is relative to me, not relative to the server I’m connecting to. Shipping I may want to limit by country of origin/destination due to taxes or available shipping services.
It also means the issue of the user above - no one from North America even has a server option, which limits use. From a physical goods perspective, there is not a single option I’m aware of that limits region by server location.
No? The instance covers a certain geographic location, for example a city. So what you want is already included in that. Federation adds nearby city instances to the mix.
AFAIK all the major classified platforms (except ebay) are location limited very similar to the above.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:06
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I’m in the United States.
Can I join and see the city closest to me? Or search by distance from me?
Me, not the server. Because the descriptions sound like thats not the case.
You chose an instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, for example your city. I don’t get what is do hard to understand about that. Afaik Craigslist or what ever you call that US platform started out the same way.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:11
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So by server.
There are no online classifieds I know of that work like that.
I literally linked you the Craigslist FAQ above that shows that they have server specific locations, just like Flohmarkt.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:25
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I think youre misunderstanding that page - those are regions, they are not server specific. You aren’t connecting to a different physical server hopping between 5 different cities across the United States (well you might be with CDNs but thats kind of besides the point).
They are designations - like an MQTT topic or a community here on Lemmy/piefed.
I can start a local community for my city here on anarchist.nexus, and a friend can create one for his local city in Canada. Its the same server, but the regions covered are different.
I can’t post on a Mastodon instance with another instance account, only comment on people’s posts. This is the same way Flohmarkt does federation.
I also can’t create an community on Lemmy with an account from another instance.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:03
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I can’t post on a Mastodon instance with another instance account, only comment on people’s posts. This is the same way Flohmarkt does federation.
Can you create a hashtag for australia with your account on a US server? Can you create a hashtag for France while living in Poland? Can you create a post with a hashtag for Romania while living in Scotland?
I also can’t create an community on Lemmy with an account from another instance.
I can easily create a post for any location without requiring an account for that instance.
You set up a server with the software that is available to you today 🤷 Don’t hide behind self-inflicted learned helplessness to be a lazy capitalist consumer…
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:29
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Ok, now you’re just being an asshole rather than understanding why its a design problem.
We are absolutely done with this conversation now. Goodbye.
You can chose your geographic location by chosing the instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, just like you chose the location of the server in Craigslist.
Obviously the server is on the internet an can be physically hosted where ever 🙄
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:35
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chosing the instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, just like you chose the location of the server in Craigslist.
No, I can’t.
Because as you just said, the server is limiting the region. Making it server and not user.
There is no server for my region (or continent), so its not something I can use without standing up my own server.
I would not consider that a good design. Its extremely limiting to adoption and expansion.
There is no server yet. Just like Craiglist doesn’t have a server for any place outside of the US afaik. Flohmarkt is very new and apparently more popular in Europe otherwise it is the same.
I think you are confusing Flohmarkt with an online retailer market like Amazon or Alibaba.
Classified listings have always worked by being location specific, and that is their main appeal and why they are popular. Flohmarkt is copying that exact tried and true design and just expands it a bit with region based federation.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:10
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There is no server yet
There shouldn’t need to be is my point. Its an arbitrary limitation.
Just like Craiglist doesn’t have a server for any place outside of the US afaik.
Thats a business decision, purely. They charge for certain types of postings.
Flohmarkt is very new and apparently more popular in Europe otherwise it is the same.
Its really not though - there is no technical reason to lock a user to a region or business reason like with Craigslist. It was a design decision.
One that limits use and adoption.
I’m glad its working out well in Europe! I, as an american, can’t use it without standing up a server and then being host to all of the United States (or North America? No idea).
Not “don’t want to” but “can’t”.
I think you are confusing Flohmarkt with an online retailer market like Amazon or Alibaba.
All of my earlier examples are direct comparisons. I’m not confusing it with anything.
I just think it wasn’t a well thought out design.
Classified listings have always worked by being location specific
Not based on where the server is set to. Based on where the user or item is.
Flohmarkt is copying that exact tried and true design
I would say they are copying hyper-localized newspaper classifieds, including the hyper-localized aspect, which caused newspaper classifieds to stop being used by the overwhelming majority of people when alternatives like Craigslist, eBay, and even Facebook market came about.
I would say they are copying hyper-localized newspaper classifieds, including the hyper-localized aspect, which caused newspaper classifieds to stop being used by the overwhelming majority of people when alternatives like Craigslist, eBay, and even Facebook market came about.
Good reply, I was coming to that conclusion based on the same response from them on my example of buying from another area. It is very odd that anyone would place such limits on functionality on an internet-bound platform.
I’m having trouble understanding if this person is representative of flohmarkt or not, but either way, I don’t think they understand any of our questions or arguments.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 16:30
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It is very odd that anyone would place such limits on functionality on an internet-bound platform.
And a federated one at that! Creating silos like this is… Counter intuitive.
I’m having trouble understanding if this person is representative of flohmarkt or not, but either way, I don’t think they understand any of our questions or arguments.
They admin slrpnk.net, no idea of their involvement with flohmarkt.
I think its safe to say they don’t understand or don’t care about any concerns though, agreed.
Yes but I can hi to Facebook market place Kijiji whatever and say search here at this distance. I’m not limited to searching Sweden because I joined a Swedish server.
Well, that is the difference between a centralized system like Facebook and a decentralized system like the Fediverse.
But why would you not join a Swedish instance that lists only Swedish offers when you live in Sweden and are interested in offers near you?
Flohmarkt isn’t a social media site or a global market place for ordering cheap crap from China 🤷
non_burglar@lemmy.world
on 02 Oct 13:49
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Decentralization is not the issue here. This is a design choice that doesn’t understand how the service will be used.
In the example of my country, Canada, let’s say I have two flohmarkt servers: east and west. To look for a certain make and model of car, I have to check my region first, then sign out, sign back into the other region?
Why would anyone continue to use this as a shopping mechanism?
This is for a classified page. Why would you expect to find offers from the other side of the country in it, especially for a large country like Canada?
That would be highly confusing and prevent browsing the listing for interesting offers near you.
Classified pages are not search tools for finding highly specialized offers to order by mail from the other side of the country. They are local listings for buying used stuff that that you might have not even have known you want before browsing the listing.
They are local listings for buying used stuff that that you might have not even have known you want before browsing the listing.
That is not how I nor anyone I know uses our listings on Kijiji. I go to look for specific things i don’t want to buy new. I do not browse used stuff for sale. I’ve personally bought motorbikes 600km away because the search area has to be bigger for more niche items. I also set up the sale of a car to a guy 1800km away via kijiji.
I couldn’t do either of these using flohmarkt, so it isn’t really useful to me, federated or not.
Someone could set up a Flohmarkt instance specifically for motorbikes which would probably serve that niche better.
Classified pages are however not predominantly used like that, at least here.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:51
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Lets say I live in the United Stats for 6 months out of the year, Spain for 2 months, Japan for 2 months, and Brazil for 2 months. Based on this design, I need servers to exist in 4 different regions.
Why?
If I’m on anarchist.nexus, I can browse lemmy.ca. I can make a local community on anarchist.nexus for my town. A user from feddit.dk can then browse and chat with me. Maybe they lived there? Maybe they’ll be back for a month in a few weeks! They can post about that in my extremely localized community.
If we switch that to items - that user from feddit.dk can’t post a listing to my local community, can they?
Why is it determined by a server region? Why isn’t it, for example, a server dedicated to listings about sports memorabilia? Do I care where the signed baseball I want to buy is? Do I care where the buyer is from that wants my tennis racket I’ve put up for sale?
What relevance is the region to the *server*? The relevance is to the *listing*.
Because this is a location specific classified page and not a global social network obviously 🙄
I really don’t get how this is so hard to understand. This is how all of these classified pages have always worked all the way back to when they were still printed in local newspapers or were just a pinboard in the local supermarket.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:01
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not a global social network obviously
So…. whats the point in federation?
This is how all of these classified pages have always worked all the way back to when they were still printed in local newspapers or were just a pinboard in the local supermarket.
It is exactly how classifieds in newspapers or a board at a supermarket works, yes!
It is in no way how an online classified system (craigslist, ebay, offerup, etc) works.
Commercial centralized online classified systems have a massive problem with ads from commercial sellers as a result, yes. Is that really what you want?
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:13
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Commercial centralized online classified systems have a massive problem with ads from commercial sellers as a result, yes.
Lets go to the example from earlier - craigslist. They do not do advertisements. Specific types of listings cost money. That is how craigslist makes money.
Do you mean sellers who make listings in many locations? Does flohmarkt have any controls to prevent that? Because from what I can see…. no, it doesn’t.
Again, lets return to the actual problem:
How do I, as a user in the United States, join and participate? As a user, not an admin. Right now.
There is no distinction between users and admins. You can set up your own instance if you feel like there is a demand for it in your city. That is how decentralized community owned systems work. The same is true for Lemmy.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:27
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There is no distinction between users and admins.
I’m sorry, but this is an absolute horror show of a sentence.
You can set up your own instance if you feel like there is a demand for it in your city.
Why would I need a whole new instance for that? What benefit is there to locking an *instance to a region rather than a listing* to a region?
Its not a technical limitation. Its not even a functional limitation for the trade or sale of someone’s stuff.
What happens when that server owner changes their region that they live?
Do you expect each person to stand up their own instance?
How do I, *as a user*, and lets assume I don’t have the technical ability or the infrastructure necessary to support standing up my own instance, use flohmarkt in the United States?
What technical reason is there for this limitation?
What functional reason is there for this limitation?
It is a good design goal to foster decentralisation.
And the creator of an instance can and should hand over responsibility to a local coop or at least a different person still interested in the location the Flohmarkt instance caters to.
And please stop demeaning yourself as a user. Are you a drug addict or what?
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:37
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It is a good design goal to foster decentralisation.
Its a shitty design that fosters silos.
And please stop demeaning yourself as a user. Are you a drug addict or what?
Stop being an asshole. I’m explaining a position and a use case, which is used for good software design.
This is a shit design. Many others have said the same and expressed their concern. You have decided to act like an asshole for no reason while I tried to explain why its a problematic design. You do that from a user perspective.
There is zero reason for you to suddenly behave like a rotten kid who was just told his toy wasn’t made well. Grow the fuck up.
It seems like on CL the city labels are mostly for human readable convenience and behind the scenes it’s by distance. You can set a distance from any point:
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 19:09
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This is correct.
You used to have to go by city/metro area only, but now you can do it by search area. That said, you can alter your metro area or search radius at any point.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 02 Oct 12:17
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I have no clue where Facebook marketplace servers are. That has never been relevant to me. Kijiji is a popular online marketplace in Canada, and it let’s you pick location or have it choose automatically based on your location.
This may be a simple matter of European marketplaces and North American ones having fundamentally different approaches.
Craigslist has server specific locations. I am not familiar with how Facebook market works, but even ebay has country specific servers, which in Europe often means very location specific due to small countries.
Obviously the actual physical location of the server doesn’t matter. When you set up a Flohmarkt instance you can freely chose a location, the city you plan to advertise your market in for example, and then also specify a circular distance of how far to federate with other Flohmarkt instances, for example to also federate adverts from neighboring cities.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:31
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Craigslist has server specific locations.
No, Craigslist has region specific sections.
The location of the server is not relevant. The servers are all hosting the same information, the user is picking the region they wish to browse.
There are not physical servers (or even virtual) to host each of those locations. They are subdirectories on a web host.
This is ridiculous. Obviously we are not talking about dialup connections where you need to call a server with the region code and a physical location 🙄
Craigslist might host it all on the same physical server since it does not support an open federation, but it is exactly the same concept as instance (=server) specific locations.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:38
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I’ll ask again - can I join any server and set my location and get local content for me, here in the United States where there is currently no server listed as being online or available?
Edit: to be clear, if I can - great! The descriptions kind of suck then and should be changed.
If not, then yeah - I would not consider that a good design/model for classifieds.
But like with ebay for example, you sign up on a locaction specific instance (ebay Germany, not ebay Spain) and chose your location that way.
To my (very limited) understanding Craigslist works the same way. You sign up and as part of the sign up you are asked for the location you are interested in, which is like an instance choser which then redirects you to a server (instance, section, whatever) that only lists adverts for that specific location that you signed up for.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 12:56
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Craigslist does not work that way, no.
You can change the region you are looking at any time you’d like. You are in no way locked in by a region or the signup process.
You are asked for a location to direct you to your local community/topic/subdirectory. You can then change that location at any time by browsing the location section of the site. You can see this now if you’d like, go to Craigslist and click the location dropdown in the upper left, and you can change where you want to browse at any time.
You can find the closest craigslist site for your geographic location by zooming in on the map or browsing the list underneath the map.
Please note that the site location for a posting cannot be changed.
You will need to start your posting over again from the beginning if you have chosen the wrong site.
It is not possible to post to more than one site at a time.
This sounds exactly how Flohmarkt works, exept that they have a convinient map for you to find the location specific site. This would probably be a nice feature for Flohmarkt as well as part of an instance chooser.
I guess what you are stuck up on is browsing listings, not posting them. But that is more like an intra-instance search tool similar to how there is the Lemmyverse search engine for Lemmy. But I find that of very limited use for a location specific market place like Flohmarkt, where you already know which location you are interested in and don’t need a search engine or drop down box to confuse you with listing options from entirely different locations.
I think there is some talk about adding more fine grained location specific groups to Flohmarkt (a bit like Lemmy communities), that would probably also allow posting from another federated account into them, but that would likely be counter productive as it would dillute the explicit location specific focus.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:24
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Sites are not physical. Sites are not locked at signup. You are misunderstanding how Craigslist (and others) work.
What this page is saying is “If you post in the Berlin section, and want to offer it in Los Angeles, you need to make a new post”.
You don’t need a different account, a different server, or to otherwise associate with a different region.
I’d be happy to explain if there is a part here that is confusing, I’m really not sure what you are not understanding on this.
I’m also not putting down the idea of a federated marketplace, I would love it.
I just think its a bad design to rely on a server setting that users have no control over. What happens if that host moves to an entirely different region? They have to keep serving that region? They can change it and all those listings are invalid?
So you are only complaining that accounts are not centralized? The entire Fediverse works like that and I don’t really see an issue with that.
And why would a host change the location for their “Classified posts for Berlin” instance? That doesn’t make any sense, since it is location specific by design.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:28
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No, I’m complaining that the server determines a user and items location.
You don’t need centralization for that. If I’m making a post, I should be able to set the location for the item at that point - this information is federated, so then the user’s server is irrelevant, only the location the user sets is relevant.
That is what makes this a bad design. It has nothing to do with centralization.
Why is it bad design that you have a location specific page where you post location specific classified ads? Thats how all of them work.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:36
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Because the ability to post is locked to a server’s region.
As you said, I can’t go in and browse the United States listings. Why? What technical reason is there to prevent me, as a user, from wanting to join?
NOT as an admin. As a user.
Lets think of this like mastodon and hashtags for a second. If the hashtag were a location, why would I need to join aus.social to see the hashtag location for Australia? Why would I need to join mstdn.ca to see the hashtags for Canada?
I think the flohmarkt design inherently works the opposite of other federated designs. It is limiting by design, limiting server use by region, rather than what a user is choosing to follow.
I’m concerned I’m not explaining something properly, so if there is a part that isn’t making sense to you, let me know.
Why would a classified site for Berlin allow you to post ads for Chicago? Just use a classifed site for Chicago 🤷
And no, the Federation model of Flohmarkt is like Mastodon, Lemmy is the odd one out, but also Lemmy does not allow starting communities on other servers. You need a local account for that.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:58
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Why would a classified site for Berlin allow you to post ads for Chicago? Just use a classifed site for Chicago 🤷
Because the same user regularly travels to both. A separate post would be absolutely fine, but I shouldn’t need an entirely different site for that. Its a listing.
And no, the Federation model of Flohmarkt is like Mastodon, Lemmy is the odd one out, but also Lemmy does not allow starting communities on other servers. You need a local account for that.
I do not need to create an account on a different server to post on that server.
I only need the one account. I am not blocked from posting in lemmy.ca because I live in the US, I’m not blocked from posting in midwest.social because I don’t live in the midwest.
Yes you need an account from the specific Mastodon instance to post on that Mastodon instance.
But anyways, that is besides the point. A classified listing is by design lioation specific. All your argument seems to boil down to is that you are annoyed that you don’t have centralized accounts to log into different classified pages 🤷
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:16
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Yes you need an account from the specific Mastodon instance to post on that Mastodon instance.
That was a Lemmy comment, but my mastadon post goes to all mastodon instances, regardless of region. Filtering or subscription is by hashtag or user. I do not get region-locked by my server to make a post, to read a post, to interact with a post.
But anyways, that is besides the point. A classified listing is by design lioation specific. All your argument seems to boil down to is that you are annoyed that you don’t have centralized accounts to log into different classified pages 🤷
No, that is not my complaint.
I, as a user, cannot use this solution. I have no way to use it, as a user, because the server determines region, not the user. I, as a user, have no way to interact with flohmarkt or my local or regional community, for reasons of a design decision that is not relevant in any way to a user or a listing.
I, as a user, can’t use flohmarkt, because the design of it does not allow me to. An arbitrary, unnecessary, forced limitation. Simple as that.
You are on anarchist.nexus and complain about self-inflicted / self-lerned helplessness? Are you serious? What do you think people that run your instance did? They took matters into their own hands and set it up. The same is true for Flohmarkt.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 14:28
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So what I’m reading is basically:
All the people who would like to use flohmarkt but can’t today can shut up or set up a server.
I am not very familiar with how the seller part of ebay works, but as a buyer I have a country specific account that only allows to bid on country specific offers. At least it was like that when I used it last some years ago.
Maybe those European buyers were using the US/global page of ebay? The German ebay is an entirely different legal entity and (at least when I last used it) didn’t interact with anything other than what happened on their website for Germany only. Maybe it works differently in Canada, no idea.
It"s one thing to limit searches bases on geographic location of items, but I should be able to change that to look up items at a destination to which I’m travelling, or just to compare to my area.
Plus, I might be more willing to travel farther to get a used car than a loveseat.
This is why it federates, you can find offers from other instances that are further away just fine. However to make curation easier and lower the server load the admin can limit the geographic distance of federation so that for example it doesn’t have to federate thousands of posts from Japan that few of the users of their location specific instance are likely interested in.
I really don’t understand why that is so hard to grasp conceptually and this is definitly good design.
Agreed. I’ve made a day trip to the neighboring state to buy a used car from a CL listing, but I probably wouldn’t travel to the other side of the country for it.
Similarly, for many things I wouldn’t travel more than an hour to get them.
The distance radius really needs to be adjustable per search to be useful outside of densely populated areas.
This is like all the popular classified websites work. This isn’t aiming to be a replacement for Amazon or Alibaba, but sites like OLX or Craigslist that are very location specific, just like Flohmarkt.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:19
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This is like all the popular classified websites work.
You would be better off describing this like newspaper classifieds.
Flohmarket does not, in any way thats relevant, work the way that Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, etc work. There is no region locking with those services by server location.
Wait, you mean it actually won’t let you set your location and search for local ads?
If someone is going to build a site for selling things, that’s ‘kind of’ the most important part of the site. Having it be federated makes that a thousand times worse. Now I’m supposed to find other local federated services in my area?
How are you so widely misunderstanding how it works? There is an location specific instance that you join when you are interested in classified ads from that location.
This isn’t a website like Alibaba for global sellers to market their products. It is a location specific classified ads page and works exactly like most of them do.
I’m just going by what’s said here because i’m not about to go through installing it to find out.
So every town that wants to sell things needs to host their own instance? And make sure that their instance doesn’t federate with other towns that are ‘too far away’?
edit:
OK I read the readme.
Why not just setup communities on the server as locations? Why is there a need to install another server for every location that wants to sell things? Certainly one server could handle thousands of locations.
Yes that is the explicit design goal of Flohmarkt and a vital prerequisite for a decentralized system. The only nearby federation is a default setting that is very easy to configure in Flohmarkt.
IMO, it’s a bad goal. Not that decentralized is a bad goal, but dictating the amount of decentralization will decimate wide adoption.
A server for every community is also a Mastodon goal that never really happened. Sure there are some out there, but the general public doesn’t want that. It’s a waste of compute resources to run a 24x7 server for every community. It’s a problem of scale. I get the decentralized point, but I think it’s going to utterly fail at widespread adotion if it needs a technical caretaker and a $20 a month bill evey time a zipcode wants to sell things. It migth work well in Germany, it’s not going to work well in most places.
The general population is used to facebook and can’t even imagine an different alternative, and just copying facebook is pointless as you just end up with another Facebook with the same bad incentives for the people running it.
Well, this is a more philosophical question, but it is a result of misaligned incentives and not because someone is having some evil master-plan. Most of today’s Facebook like sites didn’t start out as evil empires, they became so basically by necessity once they chose a certain trajectory. The only way to prevent that is to have strong defense mechanisms in place from the very beginning and that then can easily appear as the other extreme.
But only accepting one possible alternative is an extreme. You can build in safeguards… but if they’re too rigorous you will drive away potential users. Much like with freedom and security, you need to middle ground between accessibility and defensibility.
No one talks about only one possible alternative, but it is often not immediately obvious to laypersons why a defense mechanism is vital to have and can not be made a middle ground. Like for example there is no way to weaken end to end encryption a little bit to scan for CSAM, without breaking it entirely.
If there’s only ever one avenue of attack, sure. Your example posits that encryption is the only security layer that exists, which is laughable. Most security breaches happen at the personnel level, not the technical one.
A site does not “become facebook” just because it’s not 100% decentralized from every other possible service. Countless other factors go into it. Not the least of which is the nature of the people running it. If you run a service, and make it nigh impossible for a general public (your main market) to use because you fear it will become compromised, you are basically saying that you will compromise it otherwise, and probably shouldn’t be running that service.
No, this isn’t about individual persons turning bad or something silly like that. You can’t have a little decentralization either, for economic reasons. Once you get large instances in a supposedly decentralized network these by necessity need to professionalize sooner or later. Which means they need to find investors and a way to gain income from it. And then the enshittification commences… it is naive to believe that you as the founder are immune to that and if you try to resist it, the investors and other staff will find a way to push you out.
Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
on 02 Oct 10:36
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There is an instance of this in Denmark, that I have used a couple of times already. It is a nice alternative.
Hope they implement “range” soon, so you can tell how far away an item is.
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden
on 02 Oct 10:41
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Oh cool, did you actually get stuff moved?
Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
on 02 Oct 10:44
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As the admin, thanks for using it and spreading the word 🙂 if anyone feels like setting up a local instance let me know, I will point a subdomain (like aarhus.brugt-bazar.dk) your way and federate 😁
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 02 Oct 10:39
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PLEASE NOTE FOR MY FELLOW CANUCKS: I’m just starting a test on it within the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) at like a 50km range. if it’s fine after a couple days then i’ll gradually expand it out. I DON’T have a lot of time to work on it today so It’s very bare bones right now but it’s up and seems to be working fine. have at it I suppose.
Second NOTE: I have no clue how to deal with a marketplace so as far as “rules” go i’m clueless so…don’t be a dick.
I’ll probably also make my location specific instance public once I got a nice landing page for the main domain as I want to add a few other services and not only Flohmarkt in the medium term.
Edit: AFAIK the 50km range actually only specifies what other Flohmarkt instances to federate with, i.e. if someone else sets up an instance with a location within 50km of the one you set for your instance then their posts will show up on the all feed of your instance, otherwise they will not. There is nothing really stopping people from posting things outside the 50km range right now, but that might be an interesting feature for the future as well.
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden
on 02 Oct 18:30
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Which other location specific services do you have in mind? I’ve been thinking about similar things on and off. Mobilizon is a thing, and something with groups but I’m not sure what would work for locals.
I was thinking about activity tracking stuff like Wanderer or DiveDB… as my Flohmarkt instance would be also more outdoor stuff themed. But yes event management stuff like Mobilizon or Ganzio, or (non-federated) Lauti or Karrot might be an interesting option as well.
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden
on 02 Oct 19:44
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I mostly thought about a federated demokalender, but I really don’t want to moderate it or have my name in the Impressum tbh
The various local options -like FB marketplace - don’t have anything. When shipping things, yes Ebay has a really decent dispute process (leaning in favor of purchasers). Something like this would be best to aim for the local market first rather than shipped items that are harder to manage.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
on 02 Oct 13:54
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Reputation via buyer/seller history on eBay. Not so much on craigslist.
On reddit, you’d have a bot that tracked purchases and sales and their successes, which would automatically post reputation on new posts/comments in each thread.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
on 02 Oct 14:39
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huh? any serious marketplace has cheap or free basic insurance for purchases.
Routhinator@startrek.website
on 02 Oct 15:27
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But a classified ad site is not a marketplace, and that’s where we need to be mindful of the distinction.
Routhinator@startrek.website
on 02 Oct 14:41
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EBay is an exception here, its also not a classified ads site.
EBay is an auction house. Auction houses have stricter rules.
Classified ads is you grandma posting her VCR for sale, or selling your used boat locally. Its a parallel to a newspaper classified section. There has never been any control on sites like this other than “buyer beware”. Craigslist, Kijiji and Facebunk Marketplace are all classified ad equivalents and have zero guarantee or protections usually.
Given these are meant to be local ads, the onus is on the buyer to go to the sellers house and verify what they are buying.
My use of eBay is closer to my use of Craigslist instead of being like an auction. I don’t like to wait for the long bidding windows used online. I also don’t like haggling on prices. In this case, people post what they’re selling, and if I decide to buy it a third party payment platform is used to transfer funds.
The differences are that CL is usually items I pick up personally instead of being shipped (but not always), and some CL sellers only accept cash. I have also picked up eBay purchases locally.
Routhinator@startrek.website
on 02 Oct 17:52
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That’s fair, and people will use things different than the intention of the thing if it suits them. My point was more to highlight that you cannot group all things where buying and selling happen as “marketplaces” and expect the same protections/moderation etc.
This new tool is to replace the local ads/garage sale like equivalents with something self hosted. EBay is not one of these, regardless of how people choose to use it. As an auction site it is on a different level in both functional and legal experience. You cannot expect that from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace Kijiji, or you local newspaper ads or garage sales.
The strict location specificity at least strongly limits the usefulness for spamming the network with commercial ads, but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
Otherwise, could you be more specific about what kind of bad actor you mean? Obviously you can’t really prevent someone from posting fake ads for what ever nefarious purpose.
non_burglar@lemmy.world
on 02 Oct 15:24
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Come on.
but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
Users ask questions about "How would this work?"
You gave us answers that don’t seem to work for any of our use cases
Eyeroll emoji cause the user is wrong, apparently
And on top of it, you are becoming belligerent to users, insisting they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Because people are asking for things that are explicit anti-features from centralized commercial platforms that aim for platform feudalism like Amazon and Alibaba. Flohmarkt explicitly doesn’t want to replicate these and aims to be a decentralized network of location specific classified pages. Obviously there can’t be an agreement when people ask of the anti-facebook to be more like Facebook 🙄
Again, for the nth time, NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THAT. They are asking how flohmarkt works. YOU are (for some reason) insisting that we all want a centralized market.
They are asking how it works, and when you explain it to them they say: “that is bad design, why can’t it be more like ABC?” With ABC being exactly what Flohmarkt wants to avoid.
How does location specificity limit spam? Surely the nature of spam is it costs nothing to produce and is done en masse.
And I mean any kind of bad actor really. Spammer, scammer, or even just a griefer deciding the gum up the system for lulz.
To be clear these are genuine questions, I’m not here to shit on the project or anything. I’d love more than anything for there to be good answers to them.
Spam is about reach, as 99.9% of the recipients will not buy anything from a spammer. Obviously the location specificity of Flohmarkt doesn’t prevent other forms of abuse, but it makes Flohmarkt instances very unattractive for commercial spammers as you can’t reach a sufficiently broad user-base with your relatively generic ads.
I actually typed 99.999% first, but then decided some stickler would for sure question that number then 🤦
The point is that operating on hundreds of different pages that each have limited reach and interact only in a limited fashion in a way that isn’t a problem for legitimate users but severely limits the volume spammers can reach is a lot of work. Spam only makes sense when it is cheap to do and high volume.
Sorry, I’m still stuck on what the limiting aspect of it is. “Operating on hundreds of pages that each have limited reach” costs next to nothing if it’s all automated with bots.
One thing I would find valuable is mechanisms to dissuade the listings with obviously false prices. So many things on CL that aren’t really free or $1.
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden
on 02 Oct 18:27
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I think that would be up to the mods, when people then ask for more then the price or list a higher price in the description
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Oct 21:10
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Solution “payments process through the system only at the price you posted. If this isn’t done, the ad pointing to you doesn’t come down and new ones don’t go up. You only get X number of posts simultaneously.”
But then we’ve have another app to juggle all the account created to circumvent this so fuck it.
HubertManne@piefed.social
on 02 Oct 17:57
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I doubt there is any. With craiglist you did in person cash in a public setting. I only did exchanges in the police station parking lot and they had cameras for that purpose.
Finally… eBay went to shit years ago with scams and Craigslist is a shell of what it once was. Not to mention I cancelled Facebook years ago because … well because Fuck Zuck.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
on 03 Oct 09:30
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not everything on craigslist is a scam at least. i got a very nice cargo trike through there for like $2000 less than it’s worth
threaded - newest
This sounds nice - when i’m done with getting my life back in order i’m gonna start selfhosting for real, and this goes onto the “to implement"-pile! (i just realized that the pile is getting pretty large)
Don’t do a large pile.
When you get to it, start with the smallest possible thingy thats easy and fun and be proud of yourself for doing that.
Don’t even think about the pile or the mere thought of it’s existence will demotivate you from ever starting.
(ask me how I know)
How do you know?
/s
I wanted to set up a kubernetes cluster and bought 2k worth of hardware, which ended up wasting away in a box for 3 freaking years. I would occasionally get it out on a free weekend, waste 10 hours and then give up cause I had more fun things to do on a weekend. Every time I attacked the project, I had to start from scratch because of updates and me forgetting everything by then. Months passed, then years.
Eventually I abandoned the idea of kubernetes and just set it up a single node with dokploy and the next time I felt like it I added another node in swarm mode and so on.
Holy shit, sorry to hear. Hope you found some kind of use for all that hardware.
(sorry for constant edits, check the updated version)
Lol, no worries. Glad to hear it didn’t all go to waste.
Having spent a good amount of the last several weeks working on several self hosted things,I would have to agree. Simple projects shouldn’t take long… But some shit happens.
When something is done and working, it is satisfying.
Cool idea.
Would be very cool if it actually had basic functionality, like searching for items that are actually near me and not 3045390 miles way…
By default Flohmarkt recommends to set a location and only federate with instances in a certain geographic distance. So if you only see far away ads, then you are either using the wrong instance or the instance is misconfigured.
I only see far away ads because there are no public instances on my continent, as far as I can tell.
😆be the change you wish for
Brb, setting up tons of instances for my area so it looks popular
So location is by instance and not by user?
That seems an odd (and kind of problematic) design…
Why? To me that makes a lot of sense and this is also how similar popular platforms work (minus federation of course).
It should support both. On the instance side to limit a region/country matching the instance, then client side to set your actual reachable area.
Because we are talking about physical items.
The distance I would go to pick something up is relative to me, not relative to the server I’m connecting to. Shipping I may want to limit by country of origin/destination due to taxes or available shipping services.
It also means the issue of the user above - no one from North America even has a server option, which limits use. From a physical goods perspective, there is not a single option I’m aware of that limits region by server location.
Its always by user location.
No? The instance covers a certain geographic location, for example a city. So what you want is already included in that. Federation adds nearby city instances to the mix.
AFAIK all the major classified platforms (except ebay) are location limited very similar to the above.
I’m in the United States.
Can I join and see the city closest to me? Or search by distance from me?
Me, not the server. Because the descriptions sound like thats not the case.
You chose an instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, for example your city. I don’t get what is do hard to understand about that. Afaik Craigslist or what ever you call that US platform started out the same way.
So by server.
There are no online classifieds I know of that work like that.
All the ones I know work like that here in Europe, except ebay (and even they have country specific pages).
Craigslist, freecycle, Facebook market, offerup - they all go by user region, not server region.
I literally linked you the Craigslist FAQ above that shows that they have server specific locations, just like Flohmarkt.
I think youre misunderstanding that page - those are regions, they are not server specific. You aren’t connecting to a different physical server hopping between 5 different cities across the United States (well you might be with CDNs but thats kind of besides the point).
They are designations - like an MQTT topic or a community here on Lemmy/piefed.
I can start a local community for my city here on anarchist.nexus, and a friend can create one for his local city in Canada. Its the same server, but the regions covered are different.
I can’t post on a Mastodon instance with another instance account, only comment on people’s posts. This is the same way Flohmarkt does federation.
I also can’t create an community on Lemmy with an account from another instance.
Can you create a hashtag for australia with your account on a US server? Can you create a hashtag for France while living in Poland? Can you create a post with a hashtag for Romania while living in Scotland?
I can easily create a post for any location without requiring an account for that instance.
Hashtags are only search filters, nothing gets posted anywere.
And Lemmy is designed like that because it doesn’t aim to be location specific, unlike classified ads pages where that is the design goal.
Please explain to me how I, as a user in the United States, can use flohmarkt, with the current servers available and online today.
You set up a server with the software that is available to you today 🤷 Don’t hide behind self-inflicted learned helplessness to be a lazy capitalist consumer…
Ok, now you’re just being an asshole rather than understanding why its a design problem.
We are absolutely done with this conversation now. Goodbye.
www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting/…/location
So what do you call this?
There aren’t servers in each of those locations.
Its a designated region for users to make use of. User based, not server based.
What? That is 100% exactly like Flohmarkt works with server specific locations.
Maybe there is some miscommunication here.
Does the user determine their geographic region of themselves as a user, or is that determined by the server?
(Again, Craigslist works by the *user* picking a location, there is absolutely not a physical server at those locations)
You can chose your geographic location by chosing the instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, just like you chose the location of the server in Craigslist.
Obviously the server is on the internet an can be physically hosted where ever 🙄
No, I can’t.
Because as you just said, the server is limiting the region. Making it server and not user.
There is no server for my region (or continent), so its not something I can use without standing up my own server.
I would not consider that a good design. Its extremely limiting to adoption and expansion.
There is no server yet. Just like Craiglist doesn’t have a server for any place outside of the US afaik. Flohmarkt is very new and apparently more popular in Europe otherwise it is the same.
I think you are confusing Flohmarkt with an online retailer market like Amazon or Alibaba.
Classified listings have always worked by being location specific, and that is their main appeal and why they are popular. Flohmarkt is copying that exact tried and true design and just expands it a bit with region based federation.
There shouldn’t need to be is my point. Its an arbitrary limitation.
Thats a business decision, purely. They charge for certain types of postings.
Its really not though - there is no technical reason to lock a user to a region or business reason like with Craigslist. It was a design decision.
One that limits use and adoption.
I’m glad its working out well in Europe! I, as an american, can’t use it without standing up a server and then being host to all of the United States (or North America? No idea).
Not “don’t want to” but “can’t”.
All of my earlier examples are direct comparisons. I’m not confusing it with anything.
I just think it wasn’t a well thought out design.
Not based on where the server is set to. Based on where the user or item is.
I would say they are copying hyper-localized newspaper classifieds, including the hyper-localized aspect, which caused newspaper classifieds to stop being used by the overwhelming majority of people when alternatives like Craigslist, eBay, and even Facebook market came about.
Tried, yes. True… Well, I’d have to disagree.
Good reply, I was coming to that conclusion based on the same response from them on my example of buying from another area. It is very odd that anyone would place such limits on functionality on an internet-bound platform.
I’m having trouble understanding if this person is representative of flohmarkt or not, but either way, I don’t think they understand any of our questions or arguments.
And a federated one at that! Creating silos like this is… Counter intuitive.
They admin slrpnk.net, no idea of their involvement with flohmarkt.
I think its safe to say they don’t understand or don’t care about any concerns though, agreed.
Yes but I can hi to Facebook market place Kijiji whatever and say search here at this distance. I’m not limited to searching Sweden because I joined a Swedish server.
Well, that is the difference between a centralized system like Facebook and a decentralized system like the Fediverse.
But why would you not join a Swedish instance that lists only Swedish offers when you live in Sweden and are interested in offers near you?
Flohmarkt isn’t a social media site or a global market place for ordering cheap crap from China 🤷
Decentralization is not the issue here. This is a design choice that doesn’t understand how the service will be used.
In the example of my country, Canada, let’s say I have two flohmarkt servers: east and west. To look for a certain make and model of car, I have to check my region first, then sign out, sign back into the other region?
Why would anyone continue to use this as a shopping mechanism?
This is for a classified page. Why would you expect to find offers from the other side of the country in it, especially for a large country like Canada?
That would be highly confusing and prevent browsing the listing for interesting offers near you.
Classified pages are not search tools for finding highly specialized offers to order by mail from the other side of the country. They are local listings for buying used stuff that that you might have not even have known you want before browsing the listing.
That is not how I nor anyone I know uses our listings on Kijiji. I go to look for specific things i don’t want to buy new. I do not browse used stuff for sale. I’ve personally bought motorbikes 600km away because the search area has to be bigger for more niche items. I also set up the sale of a car to a guy 1800km away via kijiji.
I couldn’t do either of these using flohmarkt, so it isn’t really useful to me, federated or not.
Someone could set up a Flohmarkt instance specifically for motorbikes which would probably serve that niche better.
Classified pages are however not predominantly used like that, at least here.
Lets say I live in the United Stats for 6 months out of the year, Spain for 2 months, Japan for 2 months, and Brazil for 2 months. Based on this design, I need servers to exist in 4 different regions.
Why?
If I’m on anarchist.nexus, I can browse lemmy.ca. I can make a local community on anarchist.nexus for my town. A user from feddit.dk can then browse and chat with me. Maybe they lived there? Maybe they’ll be back for a month in a few weeks! They can post about that in my extremely localized community.
If we switch that to items - that user from feddit.dk can’t post a listing to my local community, can they?
Why is it determined by a server region? Why isn’t it, for example, a server dedicated to listings about sports memorabilia? Do I care where the signed baseball I want to buy is? Do I care where the buyer is from that wants my tennis racket I’ve put up for sale?
What relevance is the region to the *server*? The relevance is to the *listing*.
Because this is a location specific classified page and not a global social network obviously 🙄
I really don’t get how this is so hard to understand. This is how all of these classified pages have always worked all the way back to when they were still printed in local newspapers or were just a pinboard in the local supermarket.
So…. whats the point in federation?
It is exactly how classifieds in newspapers or a board at a supermarket works, yes!
It is in no way how an online classified system (craigslist, ebay, offerup, etc) works.
Commercial centralized online classified systems have a massive problem with ads from commercial sellers as a result, yes. Is that really what you want?
Lets go to the example from earlier - craigslist. They do not do advertisements. Specific types of listings cost money. That is how craigslist makes money.
Do you mean sellers who make listings in many locations? Does flohmarkt have any controls to prevent that? Because from what I can see…. no, it doesn’t.
Again, lets return to the actual problem:
How do I, as a user in the United States, join and participate? As a user, not an admin. Right now.
There is no distinction between users and admins. You can set up your own instance if you feel like there is a demand for it in your city. That is how decentralized community owned systems work. The same is true for Lemmy.
I’m sorry, but this is an absolute horror show of a sentence.
Why would I need a whole new instance for that? What benefit is there to locking an *instance to a region rather than a listing* to a region?
Its not a technical limitation. Its not even a functional limitation for the trade or sale of someone’s stuff.
What happens when that server owner changes their region that they live?
Do you expect each person to stand up their own instance?
How do I, *as a user*, and lets assume I don’t have the technical ability or the infrastructure necessary to support standing up my own instance, use flohmarkt in the United States?
What technical reason is there for this limitation?
What functional reason is there for this limitation?
It is a good design goal to foster decentralisation.
And the creator of an instance can and should hand over responsibility to a local coop or at least a different person still interested in the location the Flohmarkt instance caters to.
And please stop demeaning yourself as a user. Are you a drug addict or what?
Its a shitty design that fosters silos.
Stop being an asshole. I’m explaining a position and a use case, which is used for good software design.
This is a shit design. Many others have said the same and expressed their concern. You have decided to act like an asshole for no reason while I tried to explain why its a problematic design. You do that from a user perspective.
There is zero reason for you to suddenly behave like a rotten kid who was just told his toy wasn’t made well. Grow the fuck up.
It seems like on CL the city labels are mostly for human readable convenience and behind the scenes it’s by distance. You can set a distance from any point:
<img alt="" src="https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/a4a2d969-2ec3-43fd-a81a-e6daf1d0ceef.png">
This is correct.
You used to have to go by city/metro area only, but now you can do it by search area. That said, you can alter your metro area or search radius at any point.
I have no clue where Facebook marketplace servers are. That has never been relevant to me. Kijiji is a popular online marketplace in Canada, and it let’s you pick location or have it choose automatically based on your location.
This may be a simple matter of European marketplaces and North American ones having fundamentally different approaches.
Craigslist has server specific locations. I am not familiar with how Facebook market works, but even ebay has country specific servers, which in Europe often means very location specific due to small countries.
Obviously the actual physical location of the server doesn’t matter. When you set up a Flohmarkt instance you can freely chose a location, the city you plan to advertise your market in for example, and then also specify a circular distance of how far to federate with other Flohmarkt instances, for example to also federate adverts from neighboring cities.
No, Craigslist has region specific sections.
The location of the server is not relevant. The servers are all hosting the same information, the user is picking the region they wish to browse.
There are not physical servers (or even virtual) to host each of those locations. They are subdirectories on a web host.
This is ridiculous. Obviously we are not talking about dialup connections where you need to call a server with the region code and a physical location 🙄
Craigslist might host it all on the same physical server since it does not support an open federation, but it is exactly the same concept as instance (=server) specific locations.
I’ll ask again - can I join any server and set my location and get local content for me, here in the United States where there is currently no server listed as being online or available?
Edit: to be clear, if I can - great! The descriptions kind of suck then and should be changed.
If not, then yeah - I would not consider that a good design/model for classifieds.
No you can’t. This isn’t a centralized platform.
But like with ebay for example, you sign up on a locaction specific instance (ebay Germany, not ebay Spain) and chose your location that way.
To my (very limited) understanding Craigslist works the same way. You sign up and as part of the sign up you are asked for the location you are interested in, which is like an instance choser which then redirects you to a server (instance, section, whatever) that only lists adverts for that specific location that you signed up for.
Craigslist does not work that way, no.
You can change the region you are looking at any time you’d like. You are in no way locked in by a region or the signup process.
You are asked for a location to direct you to your local community/topic/subdirectory. You can then change that location at any time by browsing the location section of the site. You can see this now if you’d like, go to Craigslist and click the location dropdown in the upper left, and you can change where you want to browse at any time.
Its federated, thats not really a problem.
Thats the problem.
From the Craiglist site:
This sounds exactly how Flohmarkt works, exept that they have a convinient map for you to find the location specific site. This would probably be a nice feature for Flohmarkt as well as part of an instance chooser.
I guess what you are stuck up on is browsing listings, not posting them. But that is more like an intra-instance search tool similar to how there is the Lemmyverse search engine for Lemmy. But I find that of very limited use for a location specific market place like Flohmarkt, where you already know which location you are interested in and don’t need a search engine or drop down box to confuse you with listing options from entirely different locations.
I think there is some talk about adding more fine grained location specific groups to Flohmarkt (a bit like Lemmy communities), that would probably also allow posting from another federated account into them, but that would likely be counter productive as it would dillute the explicit location specific focus.
Sites are not physical. Sites are not locked at signup. You are misunderstanding how Craigslist (and others) work.
What this page is saying is “If you post in the Berlin section, and want to offer it in Los Angeles, you need to make a new post”.
You don’t need a different account, a different server, or to otherwise associate with a different region.
I’d be happy to explain if there is a part here that is confusing, I’m really not sure what you are not understanding on this.
I’m also not putting down the idea of a federated marketplace, I would love it.
I just think its a bad design to rely on a server setting that users have no control over. What happens if that host moves to an entirely different region? They have to keep serving that region? They can change it and all those listings are invalid?
It isnt a good design.
So you are only complaining that accounts are not centralized? The entire Fediverse works like that and I don’t really see an issue with that.
And why would a host change the location for their “Classified posts for Berlin” instance? That doesn’t make any sense, since it is location specific by design.
No, I’m complaining that the server determines a user and items location.
You don’t need centralization for that. If I’m making a post, I should be able to set the location for the item at that point - this information is federated, so then the user’s server is irrelevant, only the location the user sets is relevant.
That is what makes this a bad design. It has nothing to do with centralization.
Why is it bad design that you have a location specific page where you post location specific classified ads? Thats how all of them work.
Because the ability to post is locked to a server’s region.
As you said, I can’t go in and browse the United States listings. Why? What technical reason is there to prevent me, as a user, from wanting to join?
NOT as an admin. As a user.
Lets think of this like mastodon and hashtags for a second. If the hashtag were a location, why would I need to join aus.social to see the hashtag location for Australia? Why would I need to join mstdn.ca to see the hashtags for Canada?
I think the flohmarkt design inherently works the opposite of other federated designs. It is limiting by design, limiting server use by region, rather than what a user is choosing to follow.
I’m concerned I’m not explaining something properly, so if there is a part that isn’t making sense to you, let me know.
Why would a classified site for Berlin allow you to post ads for Chicago? Just use a classifed site for Chicago 🤷
And no, the Federation model of Flohmarkt is like Mastodon, Lemmy is the odd one out, but also Lemmy does not allow starting communities on other servers. You need a local account for that.
Because the same user regularly travels to both. A separate post would be absolutely fine, but I shouldn’t need an entirely different site for that. Its a listing.
I do not need to create an account on a different server to post on that server.
I only need the one account. I am not blocked from posting in lemmy.ca because I live in the US, I’m not blocked from posting in midwest.social because I don’t live in the midwest.
Yes you need an account from the specific Mastodon instance to post on that Mastodon instance.
But anyways, that is besides the point. A classified listing is by design lioation specific. All your argument seems to boil down to is that you are annoyed that you don’t have centralized accounts to log into different classified pages 🤷
That was a Lemmy comment, but my mastadon post goes to all mastodon instances, regardless of region. Filtering or subscription is by hashtag or user. I do not get region-locked by my server to make a post, to read a post, to interact with a post.
No, that is not my complaint.
I, as a user, cannot use this solution. I have no way to use it, as a user, because the server determines region, not the user. I, as a user, have no way to interact with flohmarkt or my local or regional community, for reasons of a design decision that is not relevant in any way to a user or a listing.
I, as a user, can’t use flohmarkt, because the design of it does not allow me to. An arbitrary, unnecessary, forced limitation. Simple as that.
You are on anarchist.nexus and complain about self-inflicted / self-lerned helplessness? Are you serious? What do you think people that run your instance did? They took matters into their own hands and set it up. The same is true for Flohmarkt.
So what I’m reading is basically:
That is a really shitty answer.
No, it is shitty that you expect others to do this work for you.
No it has country specific URLs. And the seller can list stuff on what instances they want. Even though lots of. Cin ship internationally.
I am not very familiar with how the seller part of ebay works, but as a buyer I have a country specific account that only allows to bid on country specific offers. At least it was like that when I used it last some years ago.
You must be joking. Ebay does not now, nor has ever worked that way.
It certainly did here in Europe.
No it doesn’t. I’ve sold items to European buyers from my location in Canada.
We are now at the point where you are completely fabricating your responses, and therefore no productive outcome can be achieved here.
Have a better day.
Maybe those European buyers were using the US/global page of ebay? The German ebay is an entirely different legal entity and (at least when I last used it) didn’t interact with anything other than what happened on their website for Germany only. Maybe it works differently in Canada, no idea.
No it isn’t I get to set the location and distance u want when searching. I’ve never had something search where the servers are.
It"s one thing to limit searches bases on geographic location of items, but I should be able to change that to look up items at a destination to which I’m travelling, or just to compare to my area.
Plus, I might be more willing to travel farther to get a used car than a loveseat.
This is def bad design.
This is why it federates, you can find offers from other instances that are further away just fine. However to make curation easier and lower the server load the admin can limit the geographic distance of federation so that for example it doesn’t have to federate thousands of posts from Japan that few of the users of their location specific instance are likely interested in.
I really don’t understand why that is so hard to grasp conceptually and this is definitly good design.
That is quite clear from your insistence that you know what users want.
They want local listings and not commercial sellers spamming them with ads yes.
Agreed. I’ve made a day trip to the neighboring state to buy a used car from a CL listing, but I probably wouldn’t travel to the other side of the country for it.
Similarly, for many things I wouldn’t travel more than an hour to get them.
The distance radius really needs to be adjustable per search to be useful outside of densely populated areas.
Okay, so you’re saying this will never be broadly used. Got it.
This is like all the popular classified websites work. This isn’t aiming to be a replacement for Amazon or Alibaba, but sites like OLX or Craigslist that are very location specific, just like Flohmarkt.
You would be better off describing this like newspaper classifieds.
Flohmarket does not, in any way thats relevant, work the way that Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, etc work. There is no region locking with those services by server location.
Then you’ve never used the German Kleinanzeigen.de.
Which is location specific for Germany, no? But yes I have never used it.
Wait, you mean it actually won’t let you set your location and search for local ads?
If someone is going to build a site for selling things, that’s ‘kind of’ the most important part of the site. Having it be federated makes that a thousand times worse. Now I’m supposed to find other local federated services in my area?
That is so against how any of this works.
How are you so widely misunderstanding how it works? There is an location specific instance that you join when you are interested in classified ads from that location.
This isn’t a website like Alibaba for global sellers to market their products. It is a location specific classified ads page and works exactly like most of them do.
I’m just going by what’s said here because i’m not about to go through installing it to find out.
So every town that wants to sell things needs to host their own instance? And make sure that their instance doesn’t federate with other towns that are ‘too far away’?
edit:
OK I read the readme.
Why not just setup communities on the server as locations? Why is there a need to install another server for every location that wants to sell things? Certainly one server could handle thousands of locations.
Yes that is the explicit design goal of Flohmarkt and a vital prerequisite for a decentralized system. The only nearby federation is a default setting that is very easy to configure in Flohmarkt.
IMO, it’s a bad goal. Not that decentralized is a bad goal, but dictating the amount of decentralization will decimate wide adoption.
A server for every community is also a Mastodon goal that never really happened. Sure there are some out there, but the general public doesn’t want that. It’s a waste of compute resources to run a 24x7 server for every community. It’s a problem of scale. I get the decentralized point, but I think it’s going to utterly fail at widespread adotion if it needs a technical caretaker and a $20 a month bill evey time a zipcode wants to sell things. It migth work well in Germany, it’s not going to work well in most places.
The general population is used to facebook and can’t even imagine an different alternative, and just copying facebook is pointless as you just end up with another Facebook with the same bad incentives for the people running it.
I didn’t say copy facebook
I’m not saying don’t decentralize at all
Forcing people to decentralize isn’t* going to work in most places.
I’m not spending any more time on the subject, I think we’re at an impassse and neither of us are going to change our minds.
Honestly, it’s a great project though,
best of luck
edit: brain said isn’t, fingers wrote is’t, autocorrect did me dirty
If only there were some kind of middle ground… sadly only extremes exist 😔
Well, this is a more philosophical question, but it is a result of misaligned incentives and not because someone is having some evil master-plan. Most of today’s Facebook like sites didn’t start out as evil empires, they became so basically by necessity once they chose a certain trajectory. The only way to prevent that is to have strong defense mechanisms in place from the very beginning and that then can easily appear as the other extreme.
But only accepting one possible alternative is an extreme. You can build in safeguards… but if they’re too rigorous you will drive away potential users. Much like with freedom and security, you need to middle ground between accessibility and defensibility.
No one talks about only one possible alternative, but it is often not immediately obvious to laypersons why a defense mechanism is vital to have and can not be made a middle ground. Like for example there is no way to weaken end to end encryption a little bit to scan for CSAM, without breaking it entirely.
If there’s only ever one avenue of attack, sure. Your example posits that encryption is the only security layer that exists, which is laughable. Most security breaches happen at the personnel level, not the technical one.
A site does not “become facebook” just because it’s not 100% decentralized from every other possible service. Countless other factors go into it. Not the least of which is the nature of the people running it. If you run a service, and make it nigh impossible for a general public (your main market) to use because you fear it will become compromised, you are basically saying that you will compromise it otherwise, and probably shouldn’t be running that service.
No, this isn’t about individual persons turning bad or something silly like that. You can’t have a little decentralization either, for economic reasons. Once you get large instances in a supposedly decentralized network these by necessity need to professionalize sooner or later. Which means they need to find investors and a way to gain income from it. And then the enshittification commences… it is naive to believe that you as the founder are immune to that and if you try to resist it, the investors and other staff will find a way to push you out.
There is an instance of this in Denmark, that I have used a couple of times already. It is a nice alternative.
Hope they implement “range” soon, so you can tell how far away an item is.
Oh cool, did you actually get stuff moved?
Yeah. I’ve sold a thing or two using it.
www.brugt-bazar.dk
As the admin, thanks for using it and spreading the word 🙂 if anyone feels like setting up a local instance let me know, I will point a subdomain (like aarhus.brugt-bazar.dk) your way and federate 😁
List of instances
welp guess I’ll set up a Canadian instance for this today. I like it. good idea.
done. https://market.andmc.ca
PLEASE NOTE FOR MY FELLOW CANUCKS: I’m just starting a test on it within the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) at like a 50km range. if it’s fine after a couple days then i’ll gradually expand it out. I DON’T have a lot of time to work on it today so It’s very bare bones right now but it’s up and seems to be working fine. have at it I suppose.
Second NOTE: I have no clue how to deal with a marketplace so as far as “rules” go i’m clueless so…don’t be a dick.
Let us know your URL if you could. I was thinking of doing it myself, but if you have the spoons, all the better.
sure thing, just gonna get started on it now so….give me like 20min.
Sorry, took 30min not 20…anywho https://market.andmc.ca
🫡
Thank you! I was wondering if there would be one soon. Glad some people were already offering to do the job.
Awesome, that is how it is done! Kudos to you 👍
I’ll probably also make my location specific instance public once I got a nice landing page for the main domain as I want to add a few other services and not only Flohmarkt in the medium term.
Edit: AFAIK the 50km range actually only specifies what other Flohmarkt instances to federate with, i.e. if someone else sets up an instance with a location within 50km of the one you set for your instance then their posts will show up on the all feed of your instance, otherwise they will not. There is nothing really stopping people from posting things outside the 50km range right now, but that might be an interesting feature for the future as well.
Which other location specific services do you have in mind? I’ve been thinking about similar things on and off. Mobilizon is a thing, and something with groups but I’m not sure what would work for locals.
I was thinking about activity tracking stuff like Wanderer or DiveDB… as my Flohmarkt instance would be also more outdoor stuff themed. But yes event management stuff like Mobilizon or Ganzio, or (non-federated) Lauti or Karrot might be an interesting option as well.
I mostly thought about a federated demokalender, but I really don’t want to moderate it or have my name in the Impressum tbh
That should be your first rule! 😁
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors?
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors on ebay and other commercial marketplaces?
Very little.
I’m not here to cheerlead for eBay, but I don’t think that’s entirely true.
The various local options -like FB marketplace - don’t have anything. When shipping things, yes Ebay has a really decent dispute process (leaning in favor of purchasers). Something like this would be best to aim for the local market first rather than shipped items that are harder to manage.
Reputation via buyer/seller history on eBay. Not so much on craigslist.
On reddit, you’d have a bot that tracked purchases and sales and their successes, which would automatically post reputation on new posts/comments in each thread.
huh? any serious marketplace has cheap or free basic insurance for purchases.
But a classified ad site is not a marketplace, and that’s where we need to be mindful of the distinction.
The flea market I go to has none of that.
EBay is an exception here, its also not a classified ads site.
EBay is an auction house. Auction houses have stricter rules.
Classified ads is you grandma posting her VCR for sale, or selling your used boat locally. Its a parallel to a newspaper classified section. There has never been any control on sites like this other than “buyer beware”. Craigslist, Kijiji and Facebunk Marketplace are all classified ad equivalents and have zero guarantee or protections usually.
Given these are meant to be local ads, the onus is on the buyer to go to the sellers house and verify what they are buying.
My use of eBay is closer to my use of Craigslist instead of being like an auction. I don’t like to wait for the long bidding windows used online. I also don’t like haggling on prices. In this case, people post what they’re selling, and if I decide to buy it a third party payment platform is used to transfer funds.
The differences are that CL is usually items I pick up personally instead of being shipped (but not always), and some CL sellers only accept cash. I have also picked up eBay purchases locally.
That’s fair, and people will use things different than the intention of the thing if it suits them. My point was more to highlight that you cannot group all things where buying and selling happen as “marketplaces” and expect the same protections/moderation etc.
This new tool is to replace the local ads/garage sale like equivalents with something self hosted. EBay is not one of these, regardless of how people choose to use it. As an auction site it is on a different level in both functional and legal experience. You cannot expect that from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace Kijiji, or you local newspaper ads or garage sales.
The strict location specificity at least strongly limits the usefulness for spamming the network with commercial ads, but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
Otherwise, could you be more specific about what kind of bad actor you mean? Obviously you can’t really prevent someone from posting fake ads for what ever nefarious purpose.
Come on.
And on top of it, you are becoming belligerent to users, insisting they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Because people are asking for things that are explicit anti-features from centralized commercial platforms that aim for platform feudalism like Amazon and Alibaba. Flohmarkt explicitly doesn’t want to replicate these and aims to be a decentralized network of location specific classified pages. Obviously there can’t be an agreement when people ask of the anti-facebook to be more like Facebook 🙄
Again, for the nth time, NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THAT. They are asking how flohmarkt works. YOU are (for some reason) insisting that we all want a centralized market.
They are asking how it works, and when you explain it to them they say: “that is bad design, why can’t it be more like ABC?” With ABC being exactly what Flohmarkt wants to avoid.
How does location specificity limit spam? Surely the nature of spam is it costs nothing to produce and is done en masse.
And I mean any kind of bad actor really. Spammer, scammer, or even just a griefer deciding the gum up the system for lulz.
To be clear these are genuine questions, I’m not here to shit on the project or anything. I’d love more than anything for there to be good answers to them.
Spam is about reach, as 99.9% of the recipients will not buy anything from a spammer. Obviously the location specificity of Flohmarkt doesn’t prevent other forms of abuse, but it makes Flohmarkt instances very unattractive for commercial spammers as you can’t reach a sufficiently broad user-base with your relatively generic ads.
Either I’ve not understood your point, or you’re suggesting that spammers would limit themselves to one instance?
Spam is about volume, and a 0.1% takeup rate would be a dream for a spammer.
I actually typed 99.999% first, but then decided some stickler would for sure question that number then 🤦
The point is that operating on hundreds of different pages that each have limited reach and interact only in a limited fashion in a way that isn’t a problem for legitimate users but severely limits the volume spammers can reach is a lot of work. Spam only makes sense when it is cheap to do and high volume.
Sorry, I’m still stuck on what the limiting aspect of it is. “Operating on hundreds of pages that each have limited reach” costs next to nothing if it’s all automated with bots.
This assumes all these hundreds of pages are exactly the same and can be automated with bots without anyone noticing immediately.
There is a reason why spam on the Fediverse almost exclusively comes from a few large generic servers.
One thing I would find valuable is mechanisms to dissuade the listings with obviously false prices. So many things on CL that aren’t really free or $1.
I think that would be up to the mods, when people then ask for more then the price or list a higher price in the description
Solution “payments process through the system only at the price you posted. If this isn’t done, the ad pointing to you doesn’t come down and new ones don’t go up. You only get X number of posts simultaneously.”
But then we’ve have another app to juggle all the account created to circumvent this so fuck it.
I doubt there is any. With craiglist you did in person cash in a public setting. I only did exchanges in the police station parking lot and they had cameras for that purpose.
Starbucks always worked for me. plenty public and plenty of cameras
shockingly, every deal went off without a hitch.
I miss craigslist
The same mechanisms that limit it on Kijiji and Craigslist, plus community labour by mods I imagine.
Love this! Ive been looking for a replacement to facebook marketplace. Too bad there are no instances set up in my country yet
Oh! I had wanted to make something like this, awesome!
Read “ad software” and was beyond terrified for a moment
What do you mean beyond terrified? Like not terrified?
Super Terrified Blue
Terrified Blanco
Terrified Pro Max.
Terrified Robespierre St Just.
Finally, selfhostable ads to deploy across your homelab services!
I’ll just go ahead and put ads.mydomain.net into uBo. And… Done.
Ha, that will show them… I mean you!
Finally… eBay went to shit years ago with scams and Craigslist is a shell of what it once was. Not to mention I cancelled Facebook years ago because … well because Fuck Zuck.
not everything on craigslist is a scam at least. i got a very nice cargo trike through there for like $2000 less than it’s worth
Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever even come close to being scammed on Craigslist… knock on wood.
Craigslist is simple and still going strong.