Read “ad software” and was beyond terrified for a moment
Finally, selfhostable ads to deploy across your homelab services!
I’ll just go ahead and put ads.mydomain.net into uBo. And… Done.
Ha, that will show them… I mean you!
What do you mean beyond terrified? Like not terrified?
Super Terrified Blue
Terrified Pro Max.
Terrified Robespierre St Just.
Terrified Blanco
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors?
I doubt there is any. With craiglist you did in person cash in a public setting. I only did exchanges in the police station parking lot and they had cameras for that purpose.
Starbucks always worked for me. plenty public and plenty of cameras
shockingly, every deal went off without a hitch.
I miss craigslist
The same mechanisms that limit it on Kijiji and Craigslist, plus community labour by mods I imagine.
The strict location specificity at least strongly limits the usefulness for spamming the network with commercial ads, but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
Otherwise, could you be more specific about what kind of bad actor you mean? Obviously you can’t really prevent someone from posting fake ads for what ever nefarious purpose.
One thing I would find valuable is mechanisms to dissuade the listings with obviously false prices. So many things on CL that aren’t really free or $1.
I think that would be up to the mods, when people then ask for more then the price or list a higher price in the description
How does location specificity limit spam? Surely the nature of spam is it costs nothing to produce and is done en masse.
And I mean any kind of bad actor really. Spammer, scammer, or even just a griefer deciding the gum up the system for lulz.
To be clear these are genuine questions, I’m not here to shit on the project or anything. I’d love more than anything for there to be good answers to them.
Spam is about reach, as 99.9% of the recipients will not buy anything from a spammer. Obviously the location specificity of Flohmarkt doesn’t prevent other forms of abuse, but it makes Flohmarkt instances very unattractive for commercial spammers as you can’t reach a sufficiently broad user-base with your relatively generic ads.
Either I’ve not understood your point, or you’re suggesting that spammers would limit themselves to one instance?
Spam is about volume, and a 0.1% takeup rate would be a dream for a spammer.
I actually typed 99.999% first, but then decided some stickler would for sure question that number then 🤦
The point is that operating on hundreds of different pages that each have limited reach and interact only in a limited fashion in a way that isn’t a problem for legitimate users but severely limits the volume spammers can reach is a lot of work. Spam only makes sense when it is cheap to do and high volume.
Sorry, I’m still stuck on what the limiting aspect of it is. “Operating on hundreds of pages that each have limited reach” costs next to nothing if it’s all automated with bots.
This assumes all these hundreds of pages are exactly the same and can be automated with bots without anyone noticing immediately.
There is a reason why spam on the Fediverse almost exclusively comes from a few large generic servers.
Come on.
but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
- Users ask questions about “How would this work?”
- You gave us answers that don’t seem to work for any of our use cases
- Eyeroll emoji cause the user is wrong, apparently
And on top of it, you are becoming belligerent to users, insisting they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Because people are asking for things that are explicit anti-features from centralized commercial platforms that aim for platform feudalism like Amazon and Alibaba. Flohmarkt explicitly doesn’t want to replicate these and aims to be a decentralized network of location specific classified pages. Obviously there can’t be an agreement when people ask of the anti-facebook to be more like Facebook 🙄
Again, for the nth time, NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THAT. They are asking how flohmarkt works. YOU are (for some reason) insisting that we all want a centralized market.
They are asking how it works, and when you explain it to them they say: “that is bad design, why can’t it be more like ABC?” With ABC being exactly what Flohmarkt wants to avoid.
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors on ebay and other commercial marketplaces?
Very little.
I’m not here to cheerlead for eBay, but I don’t think that’s entirely true.
EBay is an exception here, its also not a classified ads site.
EBay is an auction house. Auction houses have stricter rules.
Classified ads is you grandma posting her VCR for sale, or selling your used boat locally. Its a parallel to a newspaper classified section. There has never been any control on sites like this other than “buyer beware”. Craigslist, Kijiji and Facebunk Marketplace are all classified ad equivalents and have zero guarantee or protections usually.
Given these are meant to be local ads, the onus is on the buyer to go to the sellers house and verify what they are buying.
My use of eBay is closer to my use of Craigslist instead of being like an auction. I don’t like to wait for the long bidding windows used online. I also don’t like haggling on prices. In this case, people post what they’re selling, and if I decide to buy it a third party payment platform is used to transfer funds.
The differences are that CL is usually items I pick up personally instead of being shipped (but not always), and some CL sellers only accept cash. I have also picked up eBay purchases locally.
That’s fair, and people will use things different than the intention of the thing if it suits them. My point was more to highlight that you cannot group all things where buying and selling happen as “marketplaces” and expect the same protections/moderation etc.
This new tool is to replace the local ads/garage sale like equivalents with something self hosted. EBay is not one of these, regardless of how people choose to use it. As an auction site it is on a different level in both functional and legal experience. You cannot expect that from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace Kijiji, or you local newspaper ads or garage sales.
Reputation via buyer/seller history on eBay. Not so much on craigslist.
On reddit, you’d have a bot that tracked purchases and sales and their successes, which would automatically post reputation on new posts/comments in each thread.
The various local options -like FB marketplace - don’t have anything. When shipping things, yes Ebay has a really decent dispute process (leaning in favor of purchasers). Something like this would be best to aim for the local market first rather than shipped items that are harder to manage.
huh? any serious marketplace has cheap or free basic insurance for purchases.
The flea market I go to has none of that.
But a classified ad site is not a marketplace, and that’s where we need to be mindful of the distinction.
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.
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.
the explicit design goal
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.
The general population is used to facebook and can’t even imagine an different alternative, and just copying facebook is pointless as you just end up with another Facebook with the same bad incentives for the people running it.
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
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.
Then you’ve never used the German Kleinanzeigen.de.
Which is location specific for Germany, no? But yes I have never used it.
This is like all the popular classified websites work.
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.
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.
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.
Craigslist has server specific locations.
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.
No it has country specific URLs. And the seller can list stuff on what instances they want. Even though lots of. Cin ship internationally.
I am not very familiar with how the seller part of ebay works, but as a buyer I have a country specific account that only allows to bid on country specific offers. At least it was like that when I used it last some years ago.
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.
I really don’t understand why that is so hard to grasp conceptually
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.
No it isn’t I get to set the location and distance u want when searching. I’ve never had something search where the servers are.
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.
welp guess I’ll set up a Canadian instance for this today. I like it. good idea.
done. https://market.andmc.ca/
PLEASE NOTE FOR MY FELLOW CANUCKS: I’m just starting a test on it within the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) at like a 50km range. if it’s fine after a couple days then i’ll gradually expand it out. I DON’T have a lot of time to work on it today so It’s very bare bones right now but it’s up and seems to be working fine. have at it I suppose.
Second NOTE: I have no clue how to deal with a marketplace so as far as “rules” go i’m clueless so…don’t be a dick.
Awesome, that is how it is done! Kudos to you 👍
I’ll probably also make my location specific instance public once I got a nice landing page for the main domain as I want to add a few other services and not only Flohmarkt in the medium term.
Edit: AFAIK the 50km range actually only specifies what other Flohmarkt instances to federate with, i.e. if someone else sets up an instance with a location within 50km of the one you set for your instance then their posts will show up on the all feed of your instance, otherwise they will not. There is nothing really stopping people from posting things outside the 50km range right now, but that might be an interesting feature for the future as well.
Which other location specific services do you have in mind? I’ve been thinking about similar things on and off. Mobilizon is a thing, and something with groups but I’m not sure what would work for locals.
I was thinking about activity tracking stuff like Wanderer or DiveDB… as my Flohmarkt instance would be also more outdoor stuff themed. But yes event management stuff like Mobilizon or Ganzio, or (non-federated) Lauti or Karrot might be an interesting option as well.
I mostly thought about a federated demokalender, but I really don’t want to moderate it or have my name in the Impressum tbh
Let us know your URL if you could. I was thinking of doing it myself, but if you have the spoons, all the better.
sure thing, just gonna get started on it now so…give me like 20min.
Sorry, took 30min not 20…anywho https://market.andmc.ca/
Thank you! I was wondering if there would be one soon. Glad some people were already offering to do the job.
🫡
There is an instance of this in Denmark, that I have used a couple of times already. It is a nice alternative.
Hope they implement “range” soon, so you can tell how far away an item is.
Oh cool, did you actually get stuff moved?
Yeah. I’ve sold a thing or two using it.
As the admin, thanks for using it and spreading the word 🙂 if anyone feels like setting up a local instance let me know, I will point a subdomain (like aarhus.brugt-bazar.dk) your way and federate 😁
Love this! Ive been looking for a replacement to facebook marketplace. Too bad there are no instances set up in my country yet
Oh! I had wanted to make something like this, awesome!
This sounds nice - when i’m done with getting my life back in order i’m gonna start selfhosting for real, and this goes onto the “to implement”-pile! (i just realized that the pile is getting pretty large)
Don’t do a large pile.
When you get to it, start with the smallest possible thingy thats easy and fun and be proud of yourself for doing that.
Don’t even think about the pile or the mere thought of it’s existence will demotivate you from ever starting.
(ask me how I know)
Having spent a good amount of the last several weeks working on several self hosted things,I would have to agree. Simple projects shouldn’t take long… But some shit happens.
When something is done and working, it is satisfying.
How do you know?
/s
I wanted to set up a kubernetes cluster and bought 2k worth of hardware, which ended up wasting away in a box for 3 freaking years. I would occasionally get it out on a free weekend, waste 10 hours and then give up cause I had more fun things to do on a weekend. Every time I attacked the project, I had to start from scratch because of updates and me forgetting everything by then. Months passed, then years.
Eventually I abandoned the idea of kubernetes and just set it up a single node with dokploy and the next time I felt like it I added another node in swarm mode and so on.
Holy shit, sorry to hear. Hope you found some kind of use for all that hardware.
(sorry for constant edits, check the updated version)
Lol, no worries. Glad to hear it didn’t all go to waste.
Cool idea.
