Comment on flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace
poVoq@slrpnk.net 6 months agoWell, 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.
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.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 6 months ago
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*.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
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 6 months ago
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.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
Commercial centralized online classified systems have a massive problem with ads from commercial sellers as a result, yes. Is that really what you want?