Can Buy Nothing groups exist without Facebook?

Regardless of how powerful Meta has become as a company and how far into the presidential pews of power its CEO has crept, its flagship product, Facebook, is widely only known these days as being a place for junk. That's both the bad kind of junk, like AI memes of flag-waving Jesus with 100 bot comments saying “why isn’t this in the news??,” and the good kind, like the economy of free and cheap junk that has found a second life through Facebook’s Marketplace and Buy Nothing Groups. 

That latter kind of junk is the only reason many people bother to stay on Facebook, an app that’s been considered more or less a sunken ship since 2016, lost to the waves of petty Boomer racisms and the flood of bots stoking misinformation. That was nearly 10 years ago; now, with the latest wave of disgust directed at big tech due to their fascist groveling, calls to abandon Meta — even the dopamine factory of Instagram — are growing louder. 

Small neighborhood groups on Facebook are often quaint in a way that harkens back to the early internet, before it was just a place to scream at strangers about boys in girls sports, and they remain one of the only useful parts of the site left. But I’ve been wondering how much longer groups like Buy Nothing — where users do the very uncapitalist thing of giving away unwanted items, from books and furniture to broken mirrors and half-drunk bottles of Diet Coke —  will stick to the platform, and where they would go if they left it. It turns out, the founders of Buy Nothing have been trying to get people off the platform for three years, with stumbling success at best. Is this year the breaking point that will get more people to log off Facebook for good? 

“It was the No. 1 question we would receive at our help desk: ‘I’m not even on Facebook, are you going to make this available for me?’” Liesl Clark, cofounder of the Buy Nothing Project, told The Groove by phone. 

Making something from nothing 

Clark and cofounder Rebecca Rockefeller started the Buy Nothing concept as an IRL meetup in Washington state; the idea quickly took off, and they moved it online to Facebook’s still-new Groups feature in 2013 (when the site’s top trending topics included “James Gandolfini” and “the Harlem Shake”). It allowed them to coordinate more easily using the site’s infrastructure. The idea spread across the country and world, with thousands of groups popping up under the Buy Nothing branding. 

Within a few years, the group soured on Facebook for all the reasons lots of users did. 

“Facebook sells your private data to third parties and that’s something we felt was not really in alignment with our mission and our agenda,” Clark told The Groove. 

To offer an alternative, the founders developed and launched a stand-alone Buy Nothing app in 2021, and tried to encourage users to dump Facebook for the app. The move created some friction between the founders and the administrators of the local Facebook groups, who felt they were being pressured to leave the platform. The new app required fundraising to survive, and that involved appealing to venture capitalists and other investors, moves that led to accusations that the founders had sold out (you can read a full breakdown of the drama here). 

I downloaded the Buy Nothing app for the first time this week, and set my location to Crown Heights. Immediately the difference between the Facebook group and the app was clear: the Facebook version remains hyper local and active. Its very practical appeal is still thriving, the idea that one could be on the way to the grocery store or walking the dog and pop by a neighbor’s house to pick up free diapers, a waffle maker or unused CSA kale, all posted within the past few hours.

The app, on the other hand, immediately felt less local: my feed greeted me with someone giving away a box of address labels in Harlem and someone in Sunset Park giving away Tapatio-branded eyeshadow. Those are maybe good gets to some but it explodes the community to a quite wide radius. While I might say “what the hell” and go pick up that open bottle of Diet Coke on a walk, I’m not going up to Harlem for it. 

The app says it doesn’t sell your information or accept outside advertisements, the things people hate about Facebook. But the experience is also very different: you can’t click on someone’s profile to see if they’re a real person; it allows comments but there is much less conversation around each post. It doesn’t organically pop up in your feed like on Meta’s site (if you still look at that feed). It has also added features that Facebook doesn’t have, including letting you build in pick up instructions for an item. But overall, it feels a little like Craigslist. 

Clark said the app had its bumps along the way but it’s growing in popularity, with 1.4 million users today compared to Buy Nothing’s 12.4 million users on Facebook. After what some Buy Nothing users say was an aggressive push to get all users to use the app, the founders have taken a more ecumenical approach to the platforms: whatever gets you to buy less, the better. 

Clark said you can still post directly to Facebook from the app, and she still personally sets up every new Facebook page for a Buy Nothing group across the world. The founders are making more tweaks to the app to encourage building bonds among users, allowing people to shrink their radius to find more local products and developing new tools to form micro-communities within the app. 

“The time is now, there’s no better time to consider one’s options with regards to social media and the impact that social media is having on our democracy and our own mental health and our communities,” she said. 

But still, people are creatures of habit, and totally logging off what used to be the social media site has not been easy. 

“It's all such a pain. I could imagine some Buy Nothing groups will finally leave the platform,” said Sara Grace, an administrator of the East Flatbush Buy Nothing Group. “I've never looked at the app, so I don't know myself if I would go there.” 

Using the app would probably mean dissolving the existing group, she said, and that could hurt the small communities of people who have become hooked on the thrill of giving and getting free stuff in their neighborhood. One couple I met in 2022, for instance, was so notably addicted to checking the Buy Nothing page every day that the boyfriend hid his proposal in a “to give” post on their local group. The comments were full of cute jokes like: “If she doesn’t answer, you have to pick one of us.” 

“You wouldn't transfer it, you'd tell everyone, ‘This group is shutting down but you can go try the app,’ ” Grace said. “But it would certainly change the existing group dynamic. Active members have established communities in their existing FB BN group with shared history and relationships …  and moving to the official app would change their group shape dramatically.” 

Facebook locks user information like this up on purpose. Fast Company reported that in 2019, the Senate introduced a bill to make it easier to transfer personal information from one platform to another, but the bill has not yet passed. Other local Buy Nothing admins told me there are still some hurt feelings from the launch of the app, when the groups felt the founders were abandoning their many groups around the world to focus only on the app. 

Facebook was an easy way to scale the Buy Nothing idea when it started, Clark said; and the false promise of a free way to reach your audience captured everyone in that era, from small groups to major media organizations. Then Facebook foisted constant changes on the Groups feature, including letting ads for Marketplace — where stuff is for sale for very much real money — creep into Buy Nothing pages. It became harder for all 13,000 administrators of the groups to keep up.

“That’s a reason to leave because we don’t have control,” Clark said. “We were kind of idealists and not understanding fully what was behind Facebook. We got so caught up on that social experiment.”

So what is the alternative? 

The concept of “buy nothing” is undoubtedly one we all need to embrace, both for economic reasons and for environmental ones, simply because there's already so much stuff in the world. Particularly in a city like New York, we’re all constantly churning through stuff that we outgrew or never liked, and we’re swimming in a sea of other people’s junk, most of it perfectly usable, that should not go to a landfill.

But if we don’t want to give over to the very capitalist Meta company to embrace this trashpunk version of the future, what else is there besides the Buy Nothing app? Not much.

Freecycle, the predecessor to Buy Nothing, offers just a smattering of free items, with an option to travel to East Flatbush for a single travel-sized toothpaste. Nextdoor has a “free” marketplace section, but it’s full of ads, and Nextdoor has possibly fostered more hyperlocal racism than Facebook. Reddit remains one of the last good social media sites, but it has not become a buy-nothing hub yet. The simplest solution possibly remains the best alternative: the curb. When you don’t know how to get rid of something, put it on the curb and it probably will be gone within hours. It doesn’t build community in the same way, but man I love the exquisite efficiency of watching a curb item get scooped up quickly.

I am just old enough to have been an ardent user of Facebook right after college, guilty of posting an embarrassing amount of blurry photos from a point-and-shoot documenting a single night out. Ages ago, I nuked my account except for a blurry profile picture and a few old photos that I haven’t gotten around to untagging. I mostly use the site for reporting (including for this article) and to spy into the world of alternating kids’ sports photos and poorly rendered conspiracy theory memes that could have been my life if I had stayed in my hometown. 

But overall, the site’s contents have felt frozen in amber to me, and I assume many people, for a long time, a wasteland of half-remembered exes of former roommates and people I worked with 20 years ago at a newspaper that no longer exists. I used it when I was desperately searching Buy Nothing for a new cat fountain a few months back, but the process of logging on feels icky. If the Buy Nothing ethos is to create an anti-capitalist society that can support each other, Facebook does not feel like the right place. Meta reached $40.6 billion in profit last year; The Buy Nothing Project is still run by volunteers. 

“We can get these ideas out there and change human behavior and get people connected to each other. Communities become much more resilient when we have a gift economy in there,” Clark said. “There are growing pains we have gone through. Facebook has the same problems, look at how many people they have. Hopefully people will roll with it.”