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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.
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).
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.
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.
I'll ask again - can I join any server and set my location and get local content for me, here in the United States where there is currently no server listed as being online or available?
Edit: to be clear, if I can - great! The descriptions kind of suck then and should be changed.
If not, then yeah - I would not consider that a good design/model for classifieds.
No you can't. This isn't a centralized platform.
But like with ebay for example, you sign up on a locaction specific instance (ebay Germany, not ebay Spain) and chose your location that way.
To my (very limited) understanding Craigslist works the same way. You sign up and as part of the sign up you are asked for the location you are interested in, which is like an instance choser which then redirects you to a server (instance, section, whatever) that only lists adverts for that specific location that you signed up for.
Craigslist does not work that way, no.
You can change the region you are looking at any time you'd like. You are in no way locked in by a region or the signup process.
You are asked for a location to direct you to your local community/topic/subdirectory. You can then change that location at any time by browsing the location section of the site. You can see this now if you'd like, go to Craigslist and click the location dropdown in the upper left, and you can change where you want to browse at any time.
Its federated, thats not really a problem.
Thats the problem.
From the Craiglist site:
This sounds exactly how Flohmarkt works, exept that they have a convinient map for you to find the location specific site. This would probably be a nice feature for Flohmarkt as well as part of an instance chooser.
I guess what you are stuck up on is browsing listings, not posting them. But that is more like an intra-instance search tool similar to how there is the Lemmyverse search engine for Lemmy. But I find that of very limited use for a location specific market place like Flohmarkt, where you already know which location you are interested in and don't need a search engine or drop down box to confuse you with listing options from entirely different locations.
I think there is some talk about adding more fine grained location specific groups to Flohmarkt (a bit like Lemmy communities), that would probably also allow posting from another federated account into them, but that would likely be counter productive as it would dillute the explicit location specific focus.
Sites are not physical. Sites are not locked at signup. You are misunderstanding how Craigslist (and others) work.
What this page is saying is "If you post in the Berlin section, and want to offer it in Los Angeles, you need to make a new post".
You don't need a different account, a different server, or to otherwise associate with a different region.
I'd be happy to explain if there is a part here that is confusing, I'm really not sure what you are not understanding on this.
I'm also not putting down the idea of a federated marketplace, I would love it.
I just think its a bad design to rely on a server setting that users have no control over. What happens if that host moves to an entirely different region? They have to keep serving that region? They can change it and all those listings are invalid?
It isnt a good design.
So you are only complaining that accounts are not centralized? The entire Fediverse works like that and I don't really see an issue with that.
And why would a host change the location for their "Classified site for Berlin" instance? That doesn't make any sense, since it is location specific by design.
No, I'm complaining that the server determines a user and items location.
You don't need centralization for that. If I'm making a post, I should be able to set the location for the item at that point - this information is federated, so then the user's server is irrelevant, only the location the user sets is relevant.
That is what makes this a bad design. It has nothing to do with centralization.
Why is it bad design that you have a location specific page where you post location specific classified ads? Thats how all of them work.
Because the ability to post is locked to a server's region.
As you said, I can't go in and browse the United States listings. Why? What technical reason is there to prevent me, as a user, from wanting to join?
NOT as an admin. As a user.
Lets think of this like mastodon and hashtags for a second. If the hashtag were a location, why would I need to join aus.social to see the hashtag location for Australia? Why would I need to join mstdn.ca to see the hashtags for Canada?
I think the flohmarkt design inherently works the opposite of other federated designs. It is limiting by design, limiting server use by region, rather than what a user is choosing to follow.
I'm concerned I'm not explaining something properly, so if there is a part that isn't making sense to you, let me know.
Why would a classified site for Berlin allow you to post ads for Chicago? Just use a classifed site for Chicago 🤷
And no, the Federation model of Flohmarkt is like Mastodon, Lemmy is the odd one out, but also Lemmy does not allow starting communities on other servers. You need a local account for that.
Because the same user regularly travels to both. A separate post would be absolutely fine, but I shouldn't need an entirely different site for that. Its a listing.
I do not need to create an account on a different server to post on that server.
I only need the one account. I am not blocked from posting in lemmy.ca because I live in the US, I'm not blocked from posting in midwest.social because I don't live in the midwest.
Yes you need an account from the specific Mastodon instance to post on that Mastodon instance.
But anyways, that is besides the point. A classified listing is by design lioation specific. All your argument seems to boil down to is that you are annoyed that you don't have centralized accounts to log into different classified pages 🤷
That was a Lemmy comment, but my mastadon post goes to all mastodon instances, regardless of region. Filtering or subscription is by hashtag or user. I do not get region-locked by my server to make a post, to read a post, to interact with a post.
No, that is not my complaint.
I, as a user, cannot use this solution. I have no way to use it, as a user, because the server determines region, not the user. I, as a user, have no way to interact with flohmarkt or my local or regional community, for reasons of a design decision that is not relevant in any way to a user or a listing.
I, as a user, can't use flohmarkt, because the design of it does not allow me to. An arbitrary, unnecessary, forced limitation. Simple as that.
You are on anarchist.nexus and complain about self-inflicted / self-lerned helplessness? Are you serious? What do you think people that run your instance did? They took matters into their own hands and set it up. The same is true for Flohmarkt.
So what I'm reading is basically:
That is a really shitty answer.
No, it is shitty that you expect others to do this work for you.
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.
You must be joking. Ebay does not now, nor has ever worked that way.
It certainly did here in Europe.
No it doesn't. I've sold items to European buyers from my location in Canada.
We are now at the point where you are completely fabricating your responses, and therefore no productive outcome can be achieved here.
Have a better day.
Maybe those European buyers were using the US/global page of ebay? The German ebay is an entirely different legal entity and (at least when I last used it) didn't interact with anything other than what happened on their website for Germany only. Maybe it works differently in Canada, no idea.