this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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eBay/marketplace/etsy alternative.
I believe Flohmarkt is a fediverse alternative.
Interesting ... It looks pretty active. A few dozen instances, mainly in Germany. This has real potential.
Would be even better if these things didn't use completely stupid names!! They're not clever, or hip, or even fun. Flohmarkt sounds like I'd be too embarrassed to share what it is.
Is just German for flea market.
Yeah I see that now after looking it up. OK that makes more sense. Still not a great alt for North America yet
You can name your flohmarkt instance whatever you want though.
That's good to know, I see is avail on Yunohost, too
If it was named something else illogical itd work, like weinerschnitzel selling no schnitzel
Flohmarket is just the name of the software, which as another said, is the German word for flea market. I suspect the creator is German.
Anyone who self-hosts their own flohmarket instance can call their instance whatever they want.
Names are subjective. "Youtube" makes no sense if you discard all the grab that it has now in retrospective. "Craiglist" is even worse.
YouTube always made sense because "tube" is old slang for TV.
Yeah, I guess I'm old enough to remember TVs being referred to a such hah 😅
...this is the first time in the entire Fediverse that I feel not-that-old 👀
Also known as the "boob tube" with "boob" being a synonym for "idiot". I'm not that old...
There is flohmarkt.
I do think that would be neat but wonder how payments might be integrated from a technical perspective. I also wonder if there are any regulations that would get in the way or if it would even apply to something like that.
Edit: also, if people buy something then the instance goes offline. That would be another issue to figure out.
The issue in the US with accepting payments on behalf of sellers is that you have to then collect sales tax which is different for every locality. Then you also have to issue tax forms to the sellers for sales over a certain amount. Which leaves us with sellers collecting payments on their own which means using something like PayPal or Bitcoin. You would just have to have people build trust through reviews and hope for the best. You could base the service in a random other country so that you wouldn't have a bunch of regulations to deal with and leave all the tax stuff up to the buyers and sellers. You'd probably run into issues with accepting credit cards though.
What about something like wero integration? Isn't that supposed to be peer-to-peer?
I get that the trust is another issue though. What happens when a person gets stiffed? Who's guaranteeing the purchase or vetting sellers?
On darknet markets they use an escrow account and admins act as mediators, so as long as you can show that you have a valid tracking number. The issue becomes when people try to scam you by selling you broken electronics or scam buyers pulling fraud returns. Weirdly this is common with VCRs on eBay. There's large resellers who buy good VCRs and steal parts out of them and return them. Then they resell on Amazon. I guess it comes back to having a karma system.
Yeah I've thought about the question there of like is it acceptable then for those managing the instance to collect a percentage of transactions in the case where they provide payment management, arbitration, etc. Because if someone is a bad actor on Lemmy or mastadon you just ban them or the instance, but in the case of money changing hands that's more difficult to administer