Well, this is a more philosophical question, but it is a result of misaligned incentives and not because someone is having some evil master-plan. Most of today's Facebook like sites didn't start out as evil empires, they became so basically by necessity once they chose a certain trajectory. The only way to prevent that is to have strong defense mechanisms in place from the very beginning and that then can easily appear as the other extreme.
Which is location specific for Germany, no? But yes I have never used it.
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.
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.
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 ๐
It certainly did here in Europe.
Awesome, that is how it is done! Kudos to you ๐
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.
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 ๐
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.
No, it is shitty that you expect others to do this work for you.
It is a good design goal to foster decentralisation.
And the creator of an instance can and should hand over responsibility to a local coop or at least a different person still interested in the location the Flohmarkt instance caters to.
And please stop demeaning yourself as a user. Are you a drug addict or what?
I actually typed 99.999% first, but then decided some stickler would for sure question that number then ๐คฆ
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.