The name has already made this nonviable for the average person
We have to stop sending end users to software solutions for web admins. We don't send them yo "nginx" or "apache", after all.
Someone throw up a website using this software and give the site a sensible name, and then direct users to that website.
It's not that bad. It's just German for flea market. And English speakers shouldn't have an issue with at least "Markt". Not far from a cognate.
Definitely better names but I think the bigger hurdle is getting the critical mass to get something like marketplace to work in the fediverse even with the perfect name.
Yep. It’s kind of annoying when people see everything through an “english” lense and assume anything that isn’t made to work for english speakers won’t work…
Op has a point. Even English names that succeed internationally are somewhat bound by the ability of speakers of other languages to spell and pronounce the name. Y'all are here acting like what they're saying is hateful or something...
Its even more important to use various word from various language.
English as default also resulting American culture as the most prominent culture.
Newer generation are more acceptable to outside culture, so this will be work. Not to forget, the rest of non-English society already operate in multi language society and get exposed for various culture.
Years ago, people heavily localized Angliscize a lot of Asian media, but now, people are more accepting foreign naming convention. Just take a look at various FOSS porject in Japanese, Hindi, Persia, or Finnish.
No one is saying you cannot have a good German name. Uber is an American company. Shit company but great name. Comes from German and translates to other linguistic communities fairly well
But telling a friend about this starts with the name. Simple names are easier. And that would just start with making it short. Single syllable being best.
Does it? If you set up an instance for your local community/city/whatever, and name it something that makes sense for your intended userbase, I think it would be fine.
It goes from "I sold my couch on FlohMarkt" to "I sold my couch on Local Ottawa Marketplace" for the 'normies' out there. They're not going to care about the underlying software so long as their couch gets sold.
Do recommend a DIY local advertising strategy if trying to get something like this running, though - posters at IRL flea markets, adverts in small community papers for antiques and collectibles, crossposts/links to postings on stuff like MaxSold/Kijiji/Craigslist/GumTree/FB Marketplace/[insert online marketplace operating in your area] by first adopters, that kind of thing.
Focus on the current primary use case of centralized marketplace services (buying shit from your neighbours), then introduce the "Oh yeah, we've also set it up so you can see postings on Local Toronto Marketplace, Local Kingston Marketplace, Marché Local de Montréal" etc. from there.
I really, really think talking to people in terms of specific instances over the overarching platform/protocol is a way around 'normie' confusion about the Fediverse when first trying it, then getting exposure to how it works in practice will help them understand the nitty gritty stuff better. Is this problematic in some cases, like with Lemmy? A little bit, yeah. For something like FlohMarkt? I think less so.
('normie' in quotes 'cause I'm not the biggest fan of the term, but it's a useful shorthand)
Oh look, the Queen of Naming has spoken! Everything should just be named "Facebook something" or "Twitter that".
I can't understand why every other fediverse name is so stupid as to be off putting to the average user.
God... remember how fucking simple craigslist was when it hit it's peak? The fact that Grandpa could take a shaky flip phone picture and post a thing you needed right around the corner, no fat or other frivolous horseshit...
Craigslist is still simple last I checked, but the user base left and now dominated by spam from retail and drop shippers masquerading as local people selling goods from their garage.
Nothing gold can stay
At least when I used Craigslist, there was no social network element to it, so it was difficult to determine the trustworthiness of any given poster.
For that reason, I don't want a Fediverse clone of Craigslist -- I want an existing Fediverse platform to add a marketplace. I will not use anonymous marketplaces.
If you feel any kind of meaningful trustworthiness from a Facebook profile, you've probably got some other things to worry about...
I don't agree? Even in big cities, I've often seen marketplace posts from people with mutual friends, so I could easily verify their trustworthiness. In other scenarios I can at least check to see if their posting history and/or profile seems legit or if there are any red flags. Having more data helps people decide whether to trust someone, but Craigslist doesn't allow for that.
Great idea. I just wonder how Flohmarkt is read by non-Germans. Anyone want to state their opinion, their initial experience seeing the word, on that?
I think an English localization as 'Flowmarkt' or 'Flowmarket' might be more catchy in English-speaking countries, since the intended pronunciation for 'Flohmarkt' isn't clear at a first glance.
Why would English be objectively better than German?
Because more people speak it?
This is about localization, not about renaming the thing
Got it, let's name it in mandarin then
| Language | Native Speakers | Total Speakers | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | ~380 million | ~1.5 billion | Wikipedia |
| German | ~76–95 million | ~155–220 million | Wikipedia |
| Mandarin | ~941 million–1.12 billion | ~1.1–1.3 billion | Wikipedia |
Well, it has 10x more speakers than German, but it still has fewer speakers than English and most of them are localised in a single country.
Please stop being an obnoxious ass. English is the de-facto lingua franca of the world, acting like German is in any way comparable is just disingenuous.
I love that you called it the lingua franca.
Why yes, English is the French.
Uh do you not know what "lingua franca" means or are you making a joke?
just read it as 'flow market,' realized it was german, and looked up the word. it doesn't look weird at first glance.
Initial impressions of the name are not great.
Non-German but I am in the EU. Didn't find it odd at all. Just assumed it was "flow market" in German.
Close. It's flea market.
Indonesian here.
Indonesian have highest trilingual population in the world, and our country regularly import foreign pop media, like from Japan, China, Turkiye, French, Argentine, and so on.
That name seems cool and we will never have problem with it.
In fact, a lot of FOSS software in Asia almost always use local language or pop culture reference for their project. Whether it's in Chinese, Persian, Hindi, Javanese, Japanese, and so on.
Maybe someone may want to put links to Flohmarkt instances on Craigslist or FB Marketplace to put more eyes on it?
as always with these, it really comes down to whos using it.
This is what i need so i can finally delete facebook but unfortunately this is too early and small with nothing piblically uk based and no one looking at it so things would never sell.
I just set up a Slovenian instance, flohmarkt.gregtech.eu
Edit: which range should I use for it, which one do you recommend?
Maybe you can request your instance to be added here: https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt/wiki/flohmarkt-instances
any of them US?
Feel free to host an US instance :)
Really interesting! can't wait to see how it progresses along.
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)