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.
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.
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.
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.
I have no clue where Facebook marketplace servers are. That has never been relevant to me. Kijiji is a popular online marketplace in Canada, and it let’s you pick location or have it choose automatically based on your location.
This may be a simple matter of European marketplaces and North American ones having fundamentally different approaches.
Craigslist has server specific locations. I am not familiar with how Facebook market works, but even ebay has country specific servers, which in Europe often means very location specific due to small countries.
Obviously the actual physical location of the server doesn’t matter. When you set up a Flohmarkt instance you can freely chose a location, the city you plan to advertise your market in for example, and then also specify a circular distance of how far to federate with other Flohmarkt instances, for example to also federate adverts from neighboring cities.
This is ridiculous. Obviously we are not talking about dialup connections where you need to call a server with the region code and a physical location 🙄
Craigslist might host it all on the same physical server since it does not support an open federation, but it is exactly the same concept as instance (=server) specific locations.
I’ll ask again - can I join any server and set my location and get local content for me, here in the United States where there is currently no server listed as being online or available?
Edit: to be clear, if I can - great! The descriptions kind of suck then and should be changed.
If not, then yeah - I would not consider that a good design/model for classifieds.
I am not very familiar with how the seller part of ebay works, but as a buyer I have a country specific account that only allows to bid on country specific offers. At least it was like that when I used it last some years ago.
It"s one thing to limit searches bases on geographic location of items, but I should be able to change that to look up items at a destination to which I’m travelling, or just to compare to my area.
Plus, I might be more willing to travel farther to get a used car than a loveseat.
Agreed. I’ve made a day trip to the neighboring state to buy a used car from a CL listing, but I probably wouldn’t travel to the other side of the country for it.
Similarly, for many things I wouldn’t travel more than an hour to get them.
The distance radius really needs to be adjustable per search to be useful outside of densely populated areas.
This is why it federates, you can find offers from other instances that are further away just fine. However to make curation easier and lower the server load the admin can limit the geographic distance of federation so that for example it doesn’t have to federate thousands of posts from Japan that few of the users of their location specific instance are likely interested in.
I really don’t understand why that is so hard to grasp conceptually and this is definitly good design.
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?
How are you so widely misunderstanding how it works? There is an location specific instance that you join when you are interested in classified ads from that location.
This isn’t a website like Alibaba for global sellers to market their products. It is a location specific classified ads page and works exactly like most of them do.
I’m just going by what’s said here because i’m not about to go through installing it to find out.
So every town that wants to sell things needs to host their own instance? And make sure that their instance doesn’t federate with other towns that are ‘too far away’?
edit:
OK I read the readme.
Why not just setup communities on the server as locations? Why is there a need to install another server for every location that wants to sell things? Certainly one server could handle thousands of locations.
Yes that is the explicit design goal of Flohmarkt and a vital prerequisite for a decentralized system. The only nearby federation is a default setting that is very easy to configure in Flohmarkt.
IMO, it’s a bad goal. Not that decentralized is a bad goal, but dictating the amount of decentralization will decimate wide adoption.
A server for every community is also a Mastodon goal that never really happened. Sure there are some out there, but the general public doesn’t want that. It’s a waste of compute resources to run a 24x7 server for every community. It’s a problem of scale. I get the decentralized point, but I think it’s going to utterly fail at widespread adotion if it needs a technical caretaker and a $20 a month bill evey time a zipcode wants to sell things. It migth work well in Germany, it’s not going to work well in most places.
The general population is used to facebook and can’t even imagine an different alternative, and just copying facebook is pointless as you just end up with another Facebook with the same bad incentives for the people running it.
This is like all the popular classified websites work. This isn’t aiming to be a replacement for Amazon or Alibaba, but sites like OLX or Craigslist that are very location specific, just like Flohmarkt.
This is like all the popular classified websites work.
You would be better off describing this like newspaper classifieds.
Flohmarket does not, in any way thats relevant, work the way that Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, etc work. There is no region locking with those services by server location.
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.
I have no clue where Facebook marketplace servers are. That has never been relevant to me. Kijiji is a popular online marketplace in Canada, and it let’s you pick location or have it choose automatically based on your location.
This may be a simple matter of European marketplaces and North American ones having fundamentally different approaches.
Craigslist has server specific locations. I am not familiar with how Facebook market works, but even ebay has country specific servers, which in Europe often means very location specific due to small countries.
Obviously the actual physical location of the server doesn’t matter. When you set up a Flohmarkt instance you can freely chose a location, the city you plan to advertise your market in for example, and then also specify a circular distance of how far to federate with other Flohmarkt instances, for example to also federate adverts from neighboring cities.
No, Craigslist has region specific sections.
The location of the server is not relevant. The servers are all hosting the same information, the user is picking the region they wish to browse.
There are not physical servers (or even virtual) to host each of those locations. They are subdirectories on a web host.
This is ridiculous. Obviously we are not talking about dialup connections where you need to call a server with the region code and a physical location 🙄
Craigslist might host it all on the same physical server since it does not support an open federation, but it is exactly the same concept as instance (=server) specific locations.
I’ll ask again - can I join any server and set my location and get local content for me, here in the United States where there is currently no server listed as being online or available?
Edit: to be clear, if I can - great! The descriptions kind of suck then and should be changed.
If not, then yeah - I would not consider that a good design/model for classifieds.
No it has country specific URLs. And the seller can list stuff on what instances they want. Even though lots of. Cin ship internationally.
I am not very familiar with how the seller part of ebay works, but as a buyer I have a country specific account that only allows to bid on country specific offers. At least it was like that when I used it last some years ago.
You must be joking. Ebay does not now, nor has ever worked that way.
It should support both. On the instance side to limit a region/country matching the instance, then client side to set your actual reachable area.
No it isn’t I get to set the location and distance u want when searching. I’ve never had something search where the servers are.
It"s one thing to limit searches bases on geographic location of items, but I should be able to change that to look up items at a destination to which I’m travelling, or just to compare to my area.
Plus, I might be more willing to travel farther to get a used car than a loveseat.
This is def bad design.
Agreed. I’ve made a day trip to the neighboring state to buy a used car from a CL listing, but I probably wouldn’t travel to the other side of the country for it.
Similarly, for many things I wouldn’t travel more than an hour to get them.
The distance radius really needs to be adjustable per search to be useful outside of densely populated areas.
This is why it federates, you can find offers from other instances that are further away just fine. However to make curation easier and lower the server load the admin can limit the geographic distance of federation so that for example it doesn’t have to federate thousands of posts from Japan that few of the users of their location specific instance are likely interested in.
I really don’t understand why that is so hard to grasp conceptually and this is definitly good design.
That is quite clear from your insistence that you know what users want.
They want local listings and not commercial sellers spamming them with ads yes.
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.
How are you so widely misunderstanding how it works? There is an location specific instance that you join when you are interested in classified ads from that location.
This isn’t a website like Alibaba for global sellers to market their products. It is a location specific classified ads page and works exactly like most of them do.
I’m just going by what’s said here because i’m not about to go through installing it to find out.
So every town that wants to sell things needs to host their own instance? And make sure that their instance doesn’t federate with other towns that are ‘too far away’?
edit:
OK I read the readme.
Why not just setup communities on the server as locations? Why is there a need to install another server for every location that wants to sell things? Certainly one server could handle thousands of locations.
Yes that is the explicit design goal of Flohmarkt and a vital prerequisite for a decentralized system. The only nearby federation is a default setting that is very easy to configure in Flohmarkt.
IMO, it’s a bad goal. Not that decentralized is a bad goal, but dictating the amount of decentralization will decimate wide adoption.
A server for every community is also a Mastodon goal that never really happened. Sure there are some out there, but the general public doesn’t want that. It’s a waste of compute resources to run a 24x7 server for every community. It’s a problem of scale. I get the decentralized point, but I think it’s going to utterly fail at widespread adotion if it needs a technical caretaker and a $20 a month bill evey time a zipcode wants to sell things. It migth work well in Germany, it’s not going to work well in most places.
The general population is used to facebook and can’t even imagine an different alternative, and just copying facebook is pointless as you just end up with another Facebook with the same bad incentives for the people running it.
I didn’t say copy facebook
I’m not saying don’t decentralize at all
Forcing people to decentralize isn’t* going to work in most places.
I’m not spending any more time on the subject, I think we’re at an impassse and neither of us are going to change our minds.
Honestly, it’s a great project though,
best of luck
edit: brain said isn’t, fingers wrote is’t, autocorrect did me dirty
If only there were some kind of middle ground… sadly only extremes exist 😔
Okay, so you’re saying this will never be broadly used. Got it.
This is like all the popular classified websites work. This isn’t aiming to be a replacement for Amazon or Alibaba, but sites like OLX or Craigslist that are very location specific, just like Flohmarkt.
You would be better off describing this like newspaper classifieds.
Flohmarket does not, in any way thats relevant, work the way that Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, etc work. There is no region locking with those services by server location.
Then you’ve never used the German Kleinanzeigen.de.
Which is location specific for Germany, no? But yes I have never used it.