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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.
😆be the change you wish for
Brb, setting up tons of instances for my area so it looks popular
So location is by instance and not by user?
That seems an odd (and kind of problematic) design...
Why? To me that makes a lot of sense and this is also how similar popular platforms work (minus federation of course).
Because we are talking about physical items.
The distance I would go to pick something up is relative to me, not relative to the server I'm connecting to. Shipping I may want to limit by country of origin/destination due to taxes or available shipping services.
It also means the issue of the user above - no one from North America even has a server option, which limits use. From a physical goods perspective, there is not a single option I'm aware of that limits region by server location.
Its always by user location.
No? The instance covers a certain geographic location, for example a city. So what you want is already included in that. Federation adds nearby city instances to the mix.
AFAIK all the major classified platforms (except ebay) are location limited very similar to the above.
I'm in the United States.
Can I join and see the city closest to me? Or search by distance from me?
Me, not the server. Because the descriptions sound like thats not the case.
You chose an instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, for example your city. I don't get what is do hard to understand about that. Afaik Craigslist or what ever you call that US platform started out the same way.
So by server.
There are no online classifieds I know of that work like that.
https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting/features/location
So what do you call this?
There aren't servers in each of those locations.
Its a designated region for users to make use of. User based, not server based.
What? That is 100% exactly like Flohmarkt works with server specific locations.
server specific
Maybe there is some miscommunication here.
Does the user determine their geographic region of themselves as a user, or is that determined by the server?
(Again, Craigslist works by the user picking a location, there is absolutely not a physical server at those locations)
You can chose your geographic location by chosing the instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, just like you chose the location of the server in Craigslist.
Obviously the server is on the internet an can be physically hosted where ever 🙄
chosing the instance that covers the geographic location you are interested in, just like you chose the location of the server in Craigslist.
No, I can't.
Because as you just said, the server is limiting the region. Making it server and not user.
There is no server for my region (or continent), so its not something I can use without standing up my own server.
I would not consider that a good design. Its extremely limiting to adoption and expansion.
It seems like on CL the city labels are mostly for human readable convenience and behind the scenes it's by distance. You can set a distance from any point:
This is correct.
You used to have to go by city/metro area only, but now you can do it by search area. That said, you can alter your metro area or search radius at any point.
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.
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.
My use of eBay is closer to my use of Craigslist instead of being like an auction. I don't like to wait for the long bidding windows used online. I also don't like haggling on prices. In this case, people post what they're selling, and if I decide to buy it a third party payment platform is used to transfer funds.
The differences are that CL is usually items I pick up personally instead of being shipped (but not always), and some CL sellers only accept cash. I have also picked up eBay purchases locally.
That's fair, and people will use things different than the intention of the thing if it suits them. My point was more to highlight that you cannot group all things where buying and selling happen as "marketplaces" and expect the same protections/moderation etc.
This new tool is to replace the local ads/garage sale like equivalents with something self hosted. EBay is not one of these, regardless of how people choose to use it. As an auction site it is on a different level in both functional and legal experience. You cannot expect that from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace Kijiji, or you local newspaper ads or garage sales.
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 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.
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.
Because people are asking for things that are explicit anti-features from centralized commercial platforms that aim for platform feudalism like Amazon and Alibaba. Flohmarkt explicitly doesn't want to replicate these and aims to be a decentralized network of location specific classified pages. Obviously there can't be an agreement when people ask of the anti-facebook to be more like Facebook 🙄
Again, for the nth time, NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THAT. They are asking how flohmarkt works. YOU are (for some reason) insisting that we all want a centralized market.
They are asking how it works, and when you explain it to them they say: "that is bad design, why can't it be more like ABC?" With ABC being exactly what Flohmarkt wants to avoid.
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.
Solution “payments process through the system only at the price you posted. If this isn’t done, the ad pointing to you doesn’t come down and new ones don’t go up. You only get X number of posts simultaneously.”
But then we’ve have another app to juggle all the account created to circumvent this so fuck it.
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.
Spam is about reach, as 99.9% of the recipients will not buy anything from a spammer. Obviously the location specificity of Flohmarkt doesn't prevent other forms of abuse, but it makes Flohmarkt instances very unattractive for commercial spammers as you can't reach a sufficiently broad user-base with your relatively generic ads.
Either I’ve not understood your point, or you’re suggesting that spammers would limit themselves to one instance?
Spam is about volume, and a 0.1% takeup rate would be a dream for a spammer.
I actually typed 99.999% first, but then decided some stickler would for sure question that number then 🤦
The point is that operating on hundreds of different pages that each have limited reach and interact only in a limited fashion in a way that isn't a problem for legitimate users but severely limits the volume spammers can reach is a lot of work. Spam only makes sense when it is cheap to do and high volume.
Sorry, I’m still stuck on what the limiting aspect of it is. “Operating on hundreds of pages that each have limited reach” costs next to nothing if it’s all automated with bots.
Read "ad software" and was beyond terrified for a moment
What do you mean beyond terrified? Like not terrified?
Super Terrified Blue
Terrified Blanco
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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