Flohmarkt is still a really young platform, but it shows promise as a way for people to create listings, and reach out to one another.

As the Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what’s possible on the network today.

Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.

  • Samsy@lemmy.ml
    24·
    4 months ago

    Lol, must be created by a german. Flohmarkt literally means a private marketplace. Directly translated to english its a “Fleamarket”.

  • RobotToaster
    181·
    4 months ago

    A federated ebay\vinted\amazon alternative sounds like a great idea, but I saw this on their repository.

    A flohmarkt can manually federate with other flohmarkts in its range

    If I’m reading this correctly, there’s no automatic federation between instances, which will make item discovery difficult.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
      19·
      4 months ago

      The goal is to promote a local market. Not much point to have a marketplace with used items from the other side of the world.

      Although manual curation of the connected instances would also work for a specialist marketplace where you can only find specific types of items.

      I think both use-cases make more sense than general marketplace with mostly irrelevant entries.

      • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
        3·
        4 months ago

        Sure there is a use. That’s eBay. I collect older consoles and games and sometimes it’s the only way to get an item.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.net
          3·
          4 months ago

          Last time I used eBay it was also country specific.

          And for that usecase a specialised marketplace for retro-gaming that you can actually browse would be much better as well.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, I’ll try to look into this for clarity. It really depends on what they mean here - I think they’re referring to curated server following between admins, which is what PeerTube does.

      When I tested out the messaging system, I was able to federate back and forth with Mastodon. Maybe it works fine at a user level, it’s just the search entries that don’t get federated automatically?

  • a1studmuffin@aussie.zoneEnglish
    15·
    4 months ago

    One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It’ll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.

    • Omniraptor@lemm.ee
      5·
      4 months ago

      I mean, how does craigslist handle it? This doesn’t seem much more technically complex than whatever craigslist does

      • a1studmuffin@aussie.zoneEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.

  • callcc@lemmy.world
    6·
    4 months ago

    Yeah, very nice. It will be tough to bootstrap since you need a critical mass of people who ideally live close together so that it’s cheap and quick enough to deliver the items in question.

    I’ll give it a try. Nothing to loose.

  • Krafting@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 months ago

    this is really interesting, and I’d love to see it more developped and polished! Will check it out often to see progress!

  • Maeve@kbin.earth
    1·
    3 months ago

    I was thinking something like this for jobs on the fediverse would be great, then thought it would probably be filled with high paying, highly technical jobs or low paying garbage jobs, or both with no between space. I’d love to be wrong.