Submitted 11 hours ago by pntha@lemmy.world to melbourne@aussie.zone
I built Garage as a side-project and have finally realised it into production. I’m just a dude working full-time, renting in Caulfield and out of pocket for it. But I’d rather pay to host Garage than have Zuck sell me. Your support means a lot!
Mods: I realise rule 5 says no ads. If this breaks it, I’ll remove. I’m not really selling anything, just trying to give people a second option to Facebook.
This looks neat. Have you heard of the Fediverse project Flohmarkt? It seems fairly similar in concept.
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!
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.
Damn this awesome! Can please have this for my country and state?
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?
uh… mostly my bank account lol
The website works globally, theres just not options for 99.9% of people
Because for second hand goods it’s not worth it to ship overseas
That’s not what I meant - I’d like be able to list stuff for sale in my community (on the other side of the world from Melbourne) and have people here see it. But the locations in the app are restricted to Australia.
Not sure why your comment get downvotes. I had just the same question…
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 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
Gumtree seems dead af lol
It’s the place to be if you want to buy an ebike or electric scooter from the uh, legitimate owner, that for some reason just happens to be missing its charger.
Does Garage offer something Gumtree doesn’t?
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
selling a couch to somebody two streets away shouldn’t require an account on a social network, a profile that follows you around, or handing your address to a company that makes its money watching you. for a long time the only practical way to sell secondhand locally has been exactly that.
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”.
I can’t believe anyone on Lemmy is taking this uncritcally.
pntha@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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 but writing prose isn’t my forte.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I think it’d be disingenuous if you didn’t immediately, loudly disclose it to people you’re expecting to trust you with their financial information – you know, just personally.
a4ng3l@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 4 hours ago
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.