https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt
I run a Slovenian instance, https://flohmarkt.gregtech.eu/
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
32 points (97.1% liked)
Fediverse
19593 readers
39 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Cool for classified ads kind of stuff. Though personally I'd love to see more of a storefront kind of thing like Etsy. Etsy has become so greedy that it's often not profitable for small businesses and definitely not for individuals doing stuff in their free time out of passion like it used to be.
Open Food Network is worth a look.
Their repository is available.
Would prefer something that could be federated and distributed so the cost of hosting is distributed and doesn't allow for a single entity to set ridiculous prices once they get popular, like Etsy did.
Check out Flohmarkt:
Man I came to comment I had the same idea... Just to find out someone else has implemented it again...
But that's cool. I still not fully understand what this Flohmarkt is. Is it just a social platform designed to share things you want to sell instead of pictures of your food?
I should really take a deeper look into it.
Flohmarkt is German for "flea market" so I'd expect something along those lines.
You can't know it, but I am German 😅
The problem would be payments though since you probably don't want the instance admins handling your payment info. Maybe it could work more like craigslist though where payment is up to the buyer and seller to figure out, but that has its own problems. It does seem like it would be useful though if there was a way to make it fairly safe
Lots of sites offload payment directly to stripe, PayPal, etc. many even let you choose the provider. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work the same way.
Honestly a decentralised craigslist would be great.
In Belgium we have 2dehands. Not perfect or open source but miles better than Facebook marketplace.
No payments go through the platform. People meet in person and use cash or use a bank transfer or 3rd party payment like payconiq to buy and sell things. It works perfectly.
Not everything has to have an integrated shopify style payment platform. Most of the population is perfectly capable of exchanging money.
you probably don’t want the instance admins handling your payment info
Unfortunately centralized (but I don't think it's possible to do that with the traditional banking system due to gateways) but it's actually very easy to integrate with Stripe.com , as you to integrate yourself might be a day of work at most (source : I did few integration with WebXR as prototypes) but if you, as a self-hosted admin of the platform instance, just want to make it work, you probably only need a working account (to receive the actual money) and you'd fill up only IDs and voila, working.
Now there is also the KYC challenge, not sure how that work as a platform intermediary. Honestly at that point, as someone else suggested with Belgium 2ememain.be better letter user handle that themselves and in Europe with IBAN it's pretty trivial to pay online, no fee.
Might also be worth exploring https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API
there could be a centralised payment system that all instances have to use
payment system
Yeah, not going to happen.
Doing something like this "for real" on any scale takes a ton of anti-spam and anti-fraud effort. Look at how big a pain it has become to post on Craigslist, which doesn't even do commerce directly.
On a small scale it's less of a big deal. If you want an actual sales and payments platform like Etsy, it would have to be done by an organization of comparable scope, even if offloading payments to Stripe or whatever. Lots of seller vetting, dispute resolution, etc. I don't think it's impossible but it's not just a matter of software. It would need paid staff dealing with hassles all day, imho.
I see the benefits, but I also see the risks. A lot of the social stuff right now is up to the altruism and expertise of instance admins, which cannot always be guaranteed. Not to mention the risks that one user's abuse (eg. scams, contraband sales) could shut down the entire venture.
I think there needs to be a federated protocol to handle payments that also has some protections for buyers and sellers alike, but without the explicit backing of banks it simply cannot exist within the world of fiat currencies.
Obviously, you could build this with cryptocurrencies, but that limits your users and of course many people will never touch crypto with a ten foot pole