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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.