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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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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.
All the ones I know work like that here in Europe, except ebay (and even they have country specific pages).
Craigslist, freecycle, Facebook market, offerup - they all go by user region, not server region.
I literally linked you the Craigslist FAQ above that shows that they have server specific locations, just like Flohmarkt.
I think youre misunderstanding that page - those are regions, they are not server specific. You aren't connecting to a different physical server hopping between 5 different cities across the United States (well you might be with CDNs but thats kind of besides the point).
They are designations - like an MQTT topic or a community here on Lemmy/piefed.
I can start a local community for my city here on anarchist.nexus, and a friend can create one for his local city in Canada. Its the same server, but the regions covered are different.
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 you can't. This isn't a centralized platform.
But like with ebay for example, you sign up on a locaction specific instance (ebay Germany, not ebay Spain) and chose your location that way.
To my (very limited) understanding Craigslist works the same way. You sign up and as part of the sign up you are asked for the location you are interested in, which is like an instance choser which then redirects you to a server (instance, section, whatever) that only lists adverts for that specific location that you signed up for.
Craigslist does not work that way, no.
You can change the region you are looking at any time you'd like. You are in no way locked in by a region or the signup process.
You are asked for a location to direct you to your local community/topic/subdirectory. You can then change that location at any time by browsing the location section of the site. You can see this now if you'd like, go to Craigslist and click the location dropdown in the upper left, and you can change where you want to browse at any time.
Its federated, thats not really a problem.
Thats the problem.
From the Craiglist site:
This sounds exactly how Flohmarkt works, exept that they have a convinient map for you to find the location specific site. This would probably be a nice feature for Flohmarkt as well as part of an instance chooser.
I guess what you are stuck up on is browsing listings, not posting them. But that is more like an intra-instance search tool similar to how there is the Lemmyverse search engine for Lemmy. But I find that of very limited use for a location specific market place like Flohmarkt, where you already know which location you are interested in and don't need a search engine or drop down box to confuse you with listing options from entirely different locations.
I think there is some talk about adding more fine grained location specific groups to Flohmarkt (a bit like Lemmy communities), that would probably also allow posting from another federated account into them, but that would likely be counter productive as it would dillute the explicit location specific focus.
Sites are not physical. Sites are not locked at signup. You are misunderstanding how Craigslist (and others) work.
What this page is saying is "If you post in the Berlin section, and want to offer it in Los Angeles, you need to make a new post".
You don't need a different account, a different server, or to otherwise associate with a different region.
I'd be happy to explain if there is a part here that is confusing, I'm really not sure what you are not understanding on this.
I'm also not putting down the idea of a federated marketplace, I would love it.
I just think its a bad design to rely on a server setting that users have no control over. What happens if that host moves to an entirely different region? They have to keep serving that region? They can change it and all those listings are invalid?
It isnt a good design.
So you are only complaining that accounts are not centralized? The entire Fediverse works like that and I don't really see an issue with that.
And why would a host change the location for their "Classified site for Berlin" instance? That doesn't make any sense, since it is location specific by design.
No, I'm complaining that the server determines a user and items location.
You don't need centralization for that. If I'm making a post, I should be able to set the location for the item at that point - this information is federated, so then the user's server is irrelevant, only the location the user sets is relevant.
That is what makes this a bad design. It has nothing to do with centralization.
Why is it bad design that you have a location specific page where you post location specific classified ads? Thats how all of them work.
Because the ability to post is locked to a server's region.
As you said, I can't go in and browse the United States listings. Why? What technical reason is there to prevent me, as a user, from wanting to join?
NOT as an admin. As a user.
Lets think of this like mastodon and hashtags for a second. If the hashtag were a location, why would I need to join aus.social to see the hashtag location for Australia? Why would I need to join mstdn.ca to see the hashtags for Canada?
I think the flohmarkt design inherently works the opposite of other federated designs. It is limiting by design, limiting server use by region, rather than what a user is choosing to follow.
I'm concerned I'm not explaining something properly, so if there is a part that isn't making sense to you, let me know.
Why would a classified site for Berlin allow you to post ads for Chicago? Just use a classifed site for Chicago 🤷
And no, the Federation model of Flohmarkt is like Mastodon, Lemmy is the odd one out, but also Lemmy does not allow starting communities on other servers. You need a local account for that.
Because the same user regularly travels to both. A separate post would be absolutely fine, but I shouldn't need an entirely different site for that. Its a listing.
I do not need to create an account on a different server to post on that server.
I only need the one account. I am not blocked from posting in lemmy.ca because I live in the US, I'm not blocked from posting in midwest.social because I don't live in the midwest.
Yes you need an account from the specific Mastodon instance to post on that Mastodon instance.
But anyways, that is besides the point. A classified listing is by design lioation specific. All your argument seems to boil down to is that you are annoyed that you don't have centralized accounts to log into different classified pages 🤷
That was a Lemmy comment, but my mastadon post goes to all mastodon instances, regardless of region. Filtering or subscription is by hashtag or user. I do not get region-locked by my server to make a post, to read a post, to interact with a post.
No, that is not my complaint.
I, as a user, cannot use this solution. I have no way to use it, as a user, because the server determines region, not the user. I, as a user, have no way to interact with flohmarkt or my local or regional community, for reasons of a design decision that is not relevant in any way to a user or a listing.
I, as a user, can't use flohmarkt, because the design of it does not allow me to. An arbitrary, unnecessary, forced limitation. Simple as that.
You are on anarchist.nexus and complain about self-inflicted / self-lerned helplessness? Are you serious? What do you think people that run your instance did? They took matters into their own hands and set it up. The same is true for Flohmarkt.
So what I'm reading is basically:
That is a really shitty answer.
No, it is shitty that you expect others to do this work for you.
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.
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.
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.