Comment on flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 days agoNo 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) 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 2 days ago
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.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
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.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 2 days ago
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.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
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.