Man, the fact the 'About' page was plainly written by an LLM doesn't bode well for "I whipped up an alternative to Facebook Marketplace as a side project lol PS: no business experience".

I can't believe anyone on Lemmy is taking this uncritcally.

This looks neat. Have you heard of the Fediverse project Flohmarkt? It seems fairly similar in concept.

https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt

Fucking hell yes!

American, so, not gonna be able to participate locally, but yeah, if we could all somehow have an opensource, federated version of craigslist/FB market?

Absolutely yes.

And even if not, still a great project!

I hate Facebook so I like that part of this. My partner still has a Facebook, but only for the marketplace really. I don't live in Australia so it's not immediately useful for me, sadly.

Did you consider making it like self hostable and federated? A centralized platform owned by some dude, even some dude with an intact soul, brings some risks.

I have sadly come around to thinking that online "sell stuff" websites are basically doomed to failure. Marketplace now owns the space, but boy howdy, Craigslist really dropped the ball. Craigslist, as near as I can tell, has never once moved a muscle to fight scammers on their site. It straight-up drove the big crowds off. You want to buy or sell something on Craigslist now, you're dealing with 100 scammers for every 1 legitimate user. But I really like a lot of things about Craigslist: local versions of the site for every metro area and free to use for buying and only charges for selling big shit or jobs. That seems like a decent monetization scheme.

OfferUp and their ilk came in and proposed to fix the problems Craigslist wouldn't, but clearly making money was their focus, not a good customer experience. They force you to use their shit app to post listings, they serve up shit search results like Amazon for things you don't want and didn't ask for. They serve ads for shit you don't need and they also allow users to post dead listings for years on end - all to pump up their numbers and turn a profit while rendering the site about half useless.

I had my SO search for things on Marketplace too and I remember being very frustrated by how shit it was, but I can't remember what it was that was so terrible. Something about their lack of filtering making it so you had to search through gobs of crap to find things.

Anyway I wish you luck, but the secret sauce for a successful site like this seems to be elusive.

I genuinely wish you luck.

I imagine your biggest challenge will be the network effect.

Toddlers clothes and toys and other gear might be a good niche market to target. They go through heaps of stuff. Probably the only reason I still have Facebook marketplace.

Do some physical posters at daycares and community centres.

Bring it on, with no meta in my life I have fomo for secondhand stuff

I like the idea OP, and i hope you suceed, but i am curious how you hope to overcome the pitfalls of sites like this such as the flood of 'new' tat being sold from fake cheap products to local services and the crazy buy a lifestyle book/course?

Are you going to moderate everhing on your own? that's a heck of a responsibility

Also i am a fan of local sales, and like you hate FB. The next best for me is Op shops, car boots and antique shops. I am finding issues with the existing market in.

Ebay , local search ability, say i wanna just look at furniture, i could previously select the catogory and then filter by closest, in the last few years it takes me to a sales like page and tries to narrow me down to a object such as a chair or a table. Searching furniture' is quite specific. So either of those ways kinda makes it so i miss out on random items.

Gumtree: To slow and too full of other spam...want a jobs, buy your dogfood in bulk scammers etc

Vinted: Closest ideological but it seems to be tailored to clothing and smaller items. Selling items from 2106 (primark/kmart level stuff) and listing it as vintage or rare makes me close my computer in a rage.

There is defo a space in the market for your idea i just think you need to figure the niche and be objective about resources of management.

Damn this awesome! Can please have this for my country and state?

The second option to market place was gumtree no? So you're actually the third...

I'm curious why you would make it so "local". The internet is global, if it's on the net it's accessible from anywhere. Would it be much more work for you to make it work globally?