Historically speaking, the Fediverse has lacked apps related to money, trade, or commerce. Although there’s a growing number of small businesses, services, and contractors within the space, the network has largely been missing a shared marketplace for people to buy or sell things.

Flohmarkt (German for “Flea Market”) is a new platform that hopes to serve that need. The premise is simple: What if we built our own Craigslist, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace? The project is still relatively young, having only started in March 2023, but it exists today as a platform that anyone can use.

The Buying Experience

The overall experience is reminiscent of eBay, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace, in that individuals can reach out to one another to sell or exchange listed items.

Like many other Fediverse platforms, Flohmarkt offers a text-based search system for finding listings. The community is still really small, so the availability of item choice is relatively narrow compared to more popular marketplaces. Thanks to the magic of federation, it’s possible for instances to share public listings with one another, which ostensibly could aid user discovery in particular communities.

One extremely interesting here is acknowledging a limitation of today’s Fediverse: not every instance admin or user can use an integrated payment system. Instead, this platform allows users to privately message each other directly to handle the transaction out-of-band. What’s cool about this is that these interactions are not just limited to Flohmarkt members; Mastodon users can reach out about listings directly.

The Selling Experience

The UI for creating listings is minimal at the moment, and doesn’t allow for much in the way of customization or specific data. The available fields include a title, price, description, and image gallery. While it’s probably more than sufficient for getting the job done, I would love to see support for custom fields to specify things like weight, quantity, spatial dimensions, or even ISBN data pulled off of sales platforms such as Amazon.

When a person views a listing, they can express interest in the item through a Direct Message, which helpfully depicts which listing is being talked about.

This is Only the Beginning

Overall, this feels like a nice stepping stone towards a more robust method of buying and selling things in the Fediverse. It would be great to see Flohmarkt and other projects reach maturation, and I would love to have an option to make direct payments through an instance (or a wallet) when possible.

There’s still some important pieces to figure out to make this experience really shine, but it’s an interesting glimpse at what’s available today. In the near future, something like Flohmarkt may be a way to directly commission artists and buy physical things on the network.

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