flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace

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 … we’ll because Fuck Zuck.

Read "ad software" and was beyond terrified for a moment

Finally, selfhostable ads to deploy across your homelab services!
- I'll just go ahead and put ads.mydomain.net into uBo. And... Done.
What do you mean beyond terrified? Like not terrified?
- Super Terrified Blue

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.
- 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.
- So location is by instance and not by user?
  That seems an odd (and kind of problematic) design...
- Okay, so you're saying this will never be broadly used. Got it.

What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors?

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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors on ebay and other commercial marketplaces?
Very little.
- 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.
- I’m not here to cheerlead for eBay, but I don’t think that’s entirely true.
- 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.
- 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.
- huh? any serious marketplace has cheap or free basic insurance for purchases.

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.

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.
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.
🫡

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.

List of instances

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)
- 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.
- How do you know?
  /s

Love this! Ive been looking for a replacement to facebook marketplace. Too bad there are no instances set up in my country yet

Cool idea.

Oh! I had wanted to make something like this, awesome!