As this project appears to be fairly unknown in the fediverse still, I’d like to use this opportunity to advertise Flohmarkt. This Fediverse equivalent of Facebook Marketplace already has some instances up and running - see here: https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt/wiki/flohmarkt-instances
What about Craigslist
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.
Idk. It’s still got some uses. My dad got a bunch of industrial refrigerator panels for stupid cheap off Craigslist like 6 months ago.
Yeah, you can still get something from the odd crank, but used to be much more practically useful for day to day needs.
as always with these, it really comes down to whos using it.
I am super curious how does it stack against DAC7 European Directive 2021/514 from 22 march 2021.
The European law says that such sites must provide a list of users and sales
I would host an instance if it’s working well enough - has anyone done it yet?
In my local area government interrogates selling boards about my data what I sell and such. I wonder if this could be forever resistant to authorities provided somebody actually uses it?
How do I tell someone on the bus to check out this website?
I just took a list at some instances and was confused. Is there not a location-specific aspect? When I selected “Local” I got nothing. The only use I had for FB marketplace was buying/selling things locally. Like as a craigslist replacement. Not seeing that on these sites, unfortunately.
The idea would be to host local instances.
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?
It honestly just looks like a spelling mistake to me
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.
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
Chinese says hi.
Please stop these idiotic arguments. I don’t think you’re actually so dumb, that you don’t understand what my point was. So you’re being willfully obtuse just to annoy other people. Also, Chinese isn’t a thing. You probably mean Mandarin Chinese, which does have the highest number of native speakers. But English is still the common language (or lingua franca) across the world, even though it is number 3 in terms of native speakers.
Still doesn’t mean everything has to be named in English, or with whatever naming idioms marketing people and shareholders like. Have some variety in life. Go touch grass.
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?
I didn’t say it was. An important aspect of promoting the adoption of any product or service is having a brand name that is easily pronounceable to facilitate word-of-mouth promotion. It’s something that’s all the more important for a Fediverse service, given the lack of means to promote Flohmarkt with paid advertising campaigns.
While Flohmarkt works as a brand name in German, it’s not immediately clear how to pronounce it in English, versus the easily pronounced Lemmy, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, Loops, and Friendica. For that reason, ‘Flohmarkt’ should be kept as the platform’s name in German-speaking countries, but be localized as ‘Flowmarkt’ or ‘Flowmarket’ in English-speaking ones.
Do you think Flohmarkt is worse than Volkswagen?
Yes, since the pronunciation of Volkswagen can be inferred from taking ‘Volks’ as rhyming with ‘Folks’ and either pronouncing ‘wagen’ as intended—with ‘gen’ rhyming with the ‘gain’ in ‘again’—or just pronouncing it as ‘wagon’. In contrast, the pronunciation of ‘kt’ at the end of ‘flohmarkt’ can’t be inferred from an existing English word. Additionally, using the spelling ‘flow’ disambiguates the English pronunciation of ‘floh’, especially when dialect is taken into account.
Ultimately, because Volkswagen has had decades of advertisements marketing its proper pronunciation and making the brand name widely-recognized, it has an inherent advantage in terms of brand recognition to start with.
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.
Initial impressions of the name are not great.
just read it as ‘flow market,’ realized it was german, and looked up the word. it doesn’t look weird at first glance.
“flow market”
I read it as being pronounced something like “flow-marked”
yeah, it’s quite close
Swede here, see no issue with the name. I’ll just ignore the h when pronouncing though.
That’s what you should do anyway, the h simply elongates the o
I forgot its spelling the moment i scrolled past it.
At least most speakers of European languages will pronounce it close enough to German - though most will not do make the r in markt as hard as Germans do.
though most will not do make the r in markt as hard as Germans do.
Most German dialects (including standard German) barely pronounce that r. It is noticeable, but far from a “hard” pronunciation, in that case i is more like prolonging the “a” sound.
Yeah but if you had to search for it you’d have a trouble spelling it. Flowmarked would be how English speakers would hear that I think.
It probably needs an English brand name for outside the germano-sphere - fedimarket?
And why should we name things for the exclusive convenience of monolingual English speakers to the detriment of everyone else?
I don’t disagree conceptually, but English has been a lingua franca for a long time now.
That’s not an issue for brands. German and Chinese brands are just doing fine everywhere with the possible exception of the two countries in the world where people are not exposed to other languages.
Definitely weird on first reading. New names often seem weird or dumb at first so maybe I’ll just get used to it. Anglicizing it might make sense? Fleamarkt?
My American brain wants to read it as “FlowMart”, or “Flowmark”. Neither of which I have a problem with.
It reads like regurgitating dehydrated phlegm
Edit:
Anyone want to state their opinion?
Germans: “Das is der inkorrect opinion Herr Irlandisch”
Will keep an eye on this, but there is nothing too local here (No, I can’t host something myself). Given how the specification says there should be a location and radius per instance, some admins are really slacking on putting that info in the description.
That name…
They need to use an easier name, like Kleinanzeigen or something
Not enough umlauts to count as easy.
Sprich deutsch!
Du
Nachkömmling
I tried to use it myself and it really isn’t ready yet. It’s missing so many features that a specialized Lemmy instance seems like a much better alternative.
Maybe share your vision with the devs or actively contribute yourself to the development of this platform? :)
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.
Interesting idea. How do you deal with illegal trade?
Maybe just like Facebook Market, simply ignore it? /s
Maybe someone may want to put links to Flohmarkt instances on Craigslist or FB Marketplace to put more eyes on it?
