much ado about buy nothing

How an idealistic community for exchanging free stuff tried to break away from Facebook, and ended up breaking apart.

- Vauhini Vara

WHEN MY SON was little, my mom started collecting his outgrown clothes to give to strangers on the internet. She would meet these people through Buy Nothing, a project that had been created by two women from Bainbridge Island, Washington, not far from her home in Seattle. The mission of Buy Nothing, which had a local cult following, was to revive old-fashioned sharing among neighbors. People were organized by town or neighborhood into Facebook groups, where they could post what they needed, or no longer needed, and their neighbors would respond accordingly.

What made this different from Goodwill, Craigslist, or other freebie groups was that the people in your group always lived close by, and because Buy Nothing was hosted on Facebook-everyone's names and photos were visible, and messaging other members was as easy as texting. Pickups tended to happen at the front door, prompting face-to-face conversation. After a while, strangers became friendly acquaintances, their stoops integrated into your mental map of your town. Through my mom, random people came to own the forgotten detritus of my motherhood: unused diapers, a nursing cover ("that you threw in bathroom trash," my mom accused in an email). My mom had been living frugally and sustainably long before it was fashionable-diluting her dish soap, cutting her sponges into quarters and on Buy Nothing, she'd found her people.

When my son was 6, my mom retired. She packed her life into used cardboard boxes procured on Buy Nothing and moved down the street from me in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she joined a new Buy Nothing group. With her freed-up time, she acquired empty kombucha bottles on Buy Nothing, filled them with home-brewed kombucha, then regifted those. I used the group by proxy-once, to get rid of a box of half-full toiletries, another time to find a clip-on leopard tail for my son's summer theater production and eventually joined it myself.