Comment on Flohmarkt - a Fediverse replacement for Facebook Marketplace
IncogCyberspaceUser@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Great idea. I just wonder how Flohmarkt is read by non-Germans. Anyone want to state their opinion, their initial experience seeing the word, on that?
Great idea. I just wonder how Flohmarkt is read by non-Germans.
Those non-Germans using Huawei/Xiaomi phones or buying from Shein? I reckon they’d not bat an eyelid, especially for English-speakers when you explain it means “flea market”. With Shein if anyone even bothers asking about the name, all they want to know is how to pronounce it (“she in”, not “shine” or “sheen”) and what it means (“it’s complicated”, “OK, never mind then”).
It honestly just looks like a spelling mistake to me
Indonesian here.
Indonesian have highest trilingual population in the world, and our country regularly import foreign pop media, like from Japan, China, Turkiye, French, Argentine, and so on.
That name seems cool and we will never have problem with it.
In fact, a lot of FOSS software in Asia almost always use local language or pop culture reference for their project. Whether it’s in Chinese, Persian, Hindi, Javanese, Japanese, and so on.
My American brain wants to read it as “FlowMart”, or “Flowmark”. Neither of which I have a problem with.
Which is also reasonably close to the German pronunciation (which is something like Flo-marked to an English speaker)
Swede here, see no issue with the name. I’ll just ignore the h when pronouncing though.
That’s what you should do anyway, the h simply elongates the o
I forgot its spelling the moment i scrolled past it.
Non-German but I am in the EU. Didn’t find it odd at all. Just assumed it was “flow market” in German.
Close. It’s flea market.
“flow market”
Initial impressions of the name are not great.
At least most speakers of European languages will pronounce it close enough to German - though most will not do make the r in markt as hard as Germans do.
though most will not do make the r in markt as hard as Germans do.
Most German dialects (including standard German) barely pronounce that r. It is noticeable, but far from a “hard” pronunciation, in that case i is more like prolonging the “a” sound.
Yeah but if you had to search for it you’d have a trouble spelling it. Flowmarked would be how English speakers would hear that I think.
It probably needs an English brand name for outside the germano-sphere - fedimarket?
And why should we name things for the exclusive convenience of monolingual English speakers to the detriment of everyone else?
I don’t disagree conceptually, but English has been the lingua franca for a long time now.
It reads like regurgitating dehydrated phlegm
I read it as being pronounced something like “flow-marked”
yeah, it’s quite close
I think an English localization as ‘Flowmarkt’ or ‘Flowmarket’ might be more catchy in English-speaking countries, since the intended pronunciation for ‘Flohmarkt’ isn’t clear at a first glance.
Why would English be objectively better than German?
I didn’t say it was. An important aspect of promoting the adoption of any product or service is having a brand name that is easily pronounceable to facilitate word-of-mouth promotion. It’s something that’s all the more important for a Fediverse service, given the lack of means to promote Flohmarkt with paid advertising campaigns.
While Flohmarkt works as a brand name in German, it’s not immediately clear how to pronounce it in English, versus the easily pronounced Lemmy, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, Loops, and Friendica. For that reason, ‘Flohmarkt’ should be kept as the platform’s name in German-speaking countries, but be localized as ‘Flowmarket’ in English-speaking ones.
Do you think Flohmarkt is worse than Volkswagen?
Because more people speak it?
This is about localization, not about renaming the thing
Got it, let’s name it in mandarin then
Definitely weird on first reading. New names often seem weird or dumb at first so maybe I’ll just get used to it. Anglicizing it might make sense? Fleamarkt?
Kierunkowy74@piefed.social 1 year ago
Pole here.
A federated MediaMarkt. Or at least something with shopping, selling something. Definitely a German product. Should be a quality one, but I would name my instance (or a national one) differently, perhaps in a local language.
There is no point in making worldwide Flohmarkt instances (same for Mobilizon), so, the naming should be less a problem than you expect