I'm happy to announce the launch of my new personal flohmarkt instance for things I'd like to sell or give away! What's particularly nifty about flohmarkt (compared to other classifieds sites) is that you can respond to a listing by sending a direct message from your own Fediverse account, or follow a flohmarkt profile to see new listings in your timeline. It is, of course, completely free and open source software (#FOSS) too!

Over the next few weeks I expect to list mainly electronics and also some books. Everything will be available to collect yourself in Ilfracombe if you're nearby, or I can send items to you by post if not. Boosts of my listings are welcomed! Additionally, if I follow you on the Fediverse, you'll get a big discount off any item's listed price

I'm not 100% sure how everything works yet, so please don't hesitate to contact me on this account or by email if you think your message might have gone missing.

@neil introduced me to #flohmarkt and wrote a blog post about his experiences setting it up, so give that a read if you're interested in running your own - and feel free to send questions my way!

Perhaps you can help me with a little experiment: which of the following addresses bring up my flohmarkt profile when you search for them in your Fediverse software of choice?

@seabass the latter two aren't formatted as links for me

@noisytoot arrgh Fedi jank strikes again

@seabass ignoring the broken formatting, all 3 work, but the first takes noticeably longer to resolve (presumably because it's searching the text of all posts for it or something)

@seabass

All of them return your flohmarkt profile (once I read the instructions and removed the [] from the second two🤦), but the first one also returns the flohmark profile and three others.

The second two options return only the flohmarkt profile.

@TCMuffin Interesting, thank you!

@seabass all three work on phanpy

@redjives ooh, good to know; thanks!

@noisytoot hmm, that's strange. I'm actually surprised that option 2 works at all, because that one leads to an HTML page with a link element in it, and I don't think the URL it points to is valid... Thanks for testing it!

@seabass the first one brings the right account, your Mastodon account, and 2 others. The other two bring exactly one match (the expected one) – when leaving out the brackets, that is.

Tested on the Mastodon WebUI.

@IzzyOnDroid Thanks! It seems as if Mastodon is doing some sort of fuzzy search when it encounters a Fediverse handle that isn't a full URI...

@TCMuffin I can see by your screenshot that you've tried to follow the flohmarkt profile, but there's no evidence of it on the flohmarkt instance... well, except for a huge error message, that is xD Looks like there's more than a small number of issues I have to iron out with this!

@seabass

Yes I did try to follow your flohmarkt profile!

@TCMuffin Did you try to send a direct message as well?