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
I just set up a Slovenian instance, flohmarkt.gregtech.eu
Edit: which range should I use for it, which one do you recommend?
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.
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.
“I will not use anonymous marketplaces.”
“I won’t take cash, either” vibes
What if you could log in with your Mastodon (or other) Fediverse account, and they would too, so you could see their user history and connections? (And they could see yours)
You can use gpg signatures
That wouldn’t really solve it though. The problem is not a man in the middle attack. It’s someone scamming you. They can do it, then generate another signature, repeat, etc.
Web of trust - did you hear? https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x547.html
So you only trade with people in your web of trust? That’s not feasible. People flock to these websites to trade with strangers. You don’t need a middleman to trade with people you already trust.
If you feel any kind of meaningful trustworthiness from a Facebook profile, you’ve probably got some other things to worry about…
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?
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.
I’d bet a lot of money the average English speaker pronounces Volkswagen with a “vee” at the beginning
The Latin alphabet is overloaded. Words using the same script will inevitably be interpreted by other languages using their own sound systems. Orthography is bad. Plus, it’d be like asking a Spanish speaker why they say “eschool” instead of “school” (phonotactics).
Because more people speak it?
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.
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.
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.
just read it as ‘flow market,’ realized it was german, and looked up the word. it doesn’t look weird at first glance.
Ad-software huh ? Maybe this could solve the monetisation issue of let’s say PeerTube
I don’t think this can be used for monetisation, I am not sure the instance gets a cut of any sales, they are just connecting users.
That is an issue the Fediverse, with its anticapitalist stance, has yet to full address but Ghost is addressing how to monetise content in a Substack way and that subscription model is probably one that would be more acceptable on the Fediverse.
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Interesting idea. How do you deal with illegal trade?
Maybe just like Facebook Market, simply ignore it? /s
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.
Flohcebook Marktplace
Just call it Floh Market or just Floh. Flow Market or Just “Flow” would be good too.
“Facebook” is an equally alienating name if you don’t know English. But I agree, German is difficult!
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)
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
Uber isn’t a German word tho?
Etymology From German über (“above”, preposition), which is also used as a prefix (über-); cognate with over. Entered English through Nietzsche’s use of the word Übermensch. Doublet of over, super and hyper.
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.
Isn’t this more like the software you’d use to build whatever local (but maybe federated) site? Like, you don’t ask your friend if they’ve been on Shopify or Squarespace lately.
Like eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon?
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Oh look, the Queen of Naming has spoken! Everything should just be named “Facebook something” or “Twitter that”.
iMarket is better? gStore? 銷 !
SPEAK ENGLISH ÖR DIE
Germans speak or not as ör out. When you us imitate want, then make it pleasly right!
Sabbel ma nich so vonner seit döspaddel
I have myself apparently mistaken, I please about apology. In future will I try, no generalized sentence about Germans to do.
I can’t understand why every other fediverse name is so stupid as to be off putting to the average user.
- Lemmy is no better or worse than Reddit
- Pixelfeed is significantly better than Instagram
- Mastodon is much worse than Twitter
Seems to me pretty much an even spread of how good the names are
For other Fediverse software:
- Misskey is unmistakable which already makes it a good name
- PeerTube is on par with YouTube and is perfectly transparent as a description of software: “YouTube but with P2P”
- Writefreely is another clear but already proper name, definitely better than Medium or Substack (ony Medium’s advantage - it sounds better in non-English languages)
- Loops and Friendica remind better of their purposes than TikTok/Vine and Facebook
- … on the other hand, every Threadiverse app, no matter if it is /kbin, Mbin, Lemmy or PieFed, fails with it
Uber.
it’s not that it’s German (or whatever), it’s that it looks and feels like it’s gibberish. it’s incredible how little this is understood.
Uber is an easily read, easily pronounced, widely understood, positive sounding trochee. it’s a perfect brand name.
flohmarkt is 0 for 5.
Even Floh is a bit better 😕 .
That name…
They need to use an easier name, like Kleinanzeigen or something
What a horrible name.
I think the name is a nice change from most english title. It promotes cultural diversity :)
How do I tell someone on the bus to check out this website?
“Just go to fedi.markets”
I don’t see an issue. With any service on the Internet you direct people to the URL of an instance not the underlying code. If they saw “powered by flohmarkt” and asked what that was, I’d say it was German for “flea market” and I imagine they would be satisfied with that.
