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Damn this awesome! Can please have this for my country and state?
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.
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!
Hell yeah! I miss the old Craigslist it shit now and usable. But an open source market place like this one would be damn sweet!
This looks neat. Have you heard of the Fediverse project Flohmarkt? It seems fairly similar in concept.
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.
it’d be disingenuous if i didn’t admit help from an LLM. i have a compsci degree but i’m not a full-stack developer. i built the website bones and functionality but polish and writing prose isn’t my forte.
I think it'd be disingenuous if you didn't immediately, loudly disclose it to people you're expecting to trust you to interact with their financial information – you know, just personally.
i’m not expecting anyone to trust me with their financial information. there is no functionality on the website that allows money exchange. i was looking at probably introducing PayPal in the future for sellers that just want to deliver their items but no money passes through the website, only PayPal.
Damn though the first argument is some LLM is bad pitchfork level comment… it’s not even about functionalities but about how it’s written.
That makes a huge difference to something that’s meant to be an ongoing service or product rather than a throwaway script or something. Writing code is a very small part of the effort: maintaining the codebase, fixing bugs/security issues, adding features/making any changes that are needed dwarfs that, and for LLM-generated apps, that part is vastly harder. LLMs are great at generating superhuman quantities of code which works (for some definition of working), but the resulting code, being the process not of a mind with intentions and their own understanding of the nuances of the problem and the tradeoffs of solutions, is much more difficult to understand and maintain. Individual LLM edits may look sensible, but the complete codebase is incoherent, with parts mismatching, which often leads to bugs. (This is assuming that the project was developed by someone who at least reviewed the LLM changes before merging them. If it’s “vibe-coded” by using the LLM like a slot machine and not looking at the code, the result is going to be obviously garbage.) In any case, a shiny new vibe-coded web app is unlikely to last in the real world.
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 haven’t read up about federation and the required APIs and connections required but totally open to it!
Look into activitypub protocol. I'm not saying to open-source your work if you don't want to. But this would start a movement.
I'm with you my dude. I fucking hate FB but it's been the only way to get local services now. (In America btw)
I feel this would be an effective way to actually remove some of the Meta stranglehold on this.
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.
I definitely think having some social media connections (maybe optional) would help.
It's not going to stop scammers. But it's a start to identifying.
When I was shopping for used strollers (shit is expensive), I stayed away from any profile that didn't look like they actually had kids. Too many drop ship mofos who sell knockoffs. I'm putting my kids in these things and seeing family pictures does provide a bit of trust.
Bring it on, with no meta in my life I have fomo for secondhand stuff
same! i’m building a pottery studio in my garage (ha) and everyone kept telling me they see 2nd hand wheels on marketplace all the time. i was like, great— that doesn’t help me. and thus garage was born. so if anyone had a secondhand wheel they’re selling, pop it on Garage and i’ll buy it lol
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?
Because for second hand goods it's not worth it to ship overseas
uh… mostly bc of my bank account lol i can’t afford to host a global platform
The website works globally, theres just not options for 99.9% of people
sure, but every local website works globally. doesn’t mean they’re built to serve globally.
Not sure why your comment get downvotes. I had just the same question...
There are really good usages for local.
I'm not buying a couch from someone 300 miles away.
There's also buy nothing groups. You typically pick it up if it's within driving/walking distance.
The cost of shipping is also bananas. I can buy a used lamp for $3 from a neighbor, or spend $20 for that same used lamp with shipping.
Apart from rare items, the local option is better from most viewpoints. Shipping is expensive, it is much more uneconomical, escrow or buyer protection is needed. And so on...
The second option to market place was gumtree no? So you're actually the third...
yeah but Gumtree seems dead af lol. Idk, maybe Garage won’t go anywhere. i’m a cyber security professional not a business person lol
Does Garage offer something Gumtree doesn't?
a simple privacy policy, clean ad-free browsing, and most importantly: dark mode. but look, not really. if you take a look at Gumtree tho, it’s pretty dead. searching for a pottery wheel around Melbourne has listings with ages from the earliest 18 weeks and the average of about one year. marketplace came in and ate Gumtree, so unless it does something radically different soon, i think it’s just going to die.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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