Comment on flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks agoCraigslist 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.
This isn’t a centralized platform.
Its federated, thats not really a problem.
No you can’t.
Thats the problem.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
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.