Buy Nothing hopes to find success on a new app.
In the same week, Katylin has seen a banana and a boat given away between neighbors, no strings attached. In her local Buy Nothing group in Seattle, neighbors share what they have to give — vacations, gift wrap, symphony tickets, Airbnb accommodations — up for grabs to whoever wants or needs it.
The Buy Nothing Project is a rare success story of digital community-building on Facebook that blossoms offline. Founded in 2013, the project grew organically, primarily through closed Facebook groups, and then exploded in popularity during the pandemic, now counting more than 5 million members. There are 7,000 individual Buy Nothing communities across 44 countries, from a group for New York’s Chinatown to a suburb of Reykjavík in Iceland.
The app dissolves those clearly defined communities, creating a somewhat borderless experience with the individual user at the center. Instead of being in a network for your town or neighborhood, the app uses a person’s location and distance preferences to create a radius with other users nearby. The role of admins, too, is redefined — on Facebook, they are responsible for even the most tedious of tasks, like troubleshooting tech issues.
Eddie Chang, a moderator of a Buy Nothing group on the Upper East Side in New York, says some administrators feel the addition of the app might unnecessarily complicate a system that was already working well. Expanding the project requires the money to cover increasing costs, potentially putting it in a tough spot if funding dries up.
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