As Buy Nothing groups expand across NYC, so does the drama

Korissa Matta had two months to move out of her old apartment in the East Village in spring 2022. She wanted to use her local Buy Nothing group to give away her old stuff.

But over the course of the summer, she was removed from the group twice for not responding quickly enough to an admin confirming that she still lived in the area.

Matta said the rules seemed unnecessary.

“People don’t want to follow all of those rules to get rid of a yoga mat that’s chewed up by their dog,” she said.

Even though Matta joined another Buy Nothing group after moving, she doesn’t use it anymore. But she said she’d put up with the drama if she needed to use the group again in a pinch.

It’s a pinch that many New Yorkers are feeling these days.

Buy Nothing groups, which connect people via Facebook to distribute free items, are having a moment in New York City, where rents have been rising faster than wages.

One group in Bushwick has more than doubled over the past three years and now counts over 17,000 members. In the East Village, group admin Sunny Cervantes said she’s flooded with too many membership requests to keep up with. Her group is 4,000 strong.

“These are hard times,” Cervantes said. “People need help.”

Scanning the groups across the five boroughs, there’s nearly no limit to what people give away. Nightstands, aquarium gravel, fire safety notice stickers, eight brown eggs, half a box of condoms, a Thanksgiving turkey — if you can think of it, it’s probably been on Buy Nothing. And as the cost of living keeps increasing, members will stomach almost any amount of drama and red tape for the savings.

There are more than 100 Buy Nothing groups across the city and more than 120,000 worldwide — and most follow rules set by a loosely organized national entity, the Buy Nothing Project.

In New York City, members said these groups make hard times easier by helping them save money, reduce waste and build community. Several people interviewed for this story said they’d saved thousands of dollars and furnished their apartments with items sourced from Buy Nothing groups.

But as the groups expand across the city, so do the challenges. Sometimes there are just too many people in them to be used effectively, so admins divide them in two. Other times members defect and start their own groups after disagreements over what the groups are for.

That’s because Buy Nothing groups are about more than just free stuff. Most aim to build neighborhood consciousness out of free stuff: little communities of mutual aid, equity and cooperation. But not everyone agrees on how to do that, and building a community is even harder when it’s happening in Facebook comments sections and under posts about free furniture.

And while in theory the basic rules are simple (no buying, no selling, no trading), in practice, according to several current and former Buy Nothing members interviewed for this story, rules can feel restrictive, fights can break out over silly issues and moderators can zealously enforce seemingly arbitrary rules. But plenty of other members said the rules and drama don’t faze them — they’re just happy to save a few bucks.

Rules upon rules

These groups aren’t complete free-for-alls, and members tend to follow the rules. And there are a lot of them. Many can be boiled down to keeping promises: If you agree to pick up an item, actually show up. Or if you agree to give an item to one person, don’t give it to someone else.

Other rules are less obvious, like one against using acronyms in posts, such as the immensely popular “ISO” — short for “in search of” — to request items. Initially implemented to guard against members using inaccessible language, it was rolled back in the national platform's guidance in 2023 after group admins complained the rule itself limited access by excluding visually impaired people or those with low literacy levels.

Adhering to the rules can be a bit of a balancing act. In the East Village group, for instance, all posts must include cross streets to help recipients know where to pick up items, but that rule was walked back when people complained about privacy violations. And another rule, designed to protect privacy, discourages members from asking about another person’s best time window to exchange items.

There are informal rules, too.

After the same few members kept claiming items in Tess Griffin’s group in Forest Hills, moderators started encouraging gifters to let items “simmer” — in-group slang for allowing others time, usually a day or two, to express interest before giving items away.

But who should get them? Griffin’s solution: Raffle off items randomly to commenters. It’s worked out pretty well for her.

And like almost every member interviewed for this story, Griffin emphasized that her experiences have been mostly positive, despite a few people making the experience challenging at times.

Growing pains

Another source of contention in local Buy Nothing groups is just how local they should be. The national project originally asked members to participate in only a single group, respecting its neighborhood borders. But some members feared that could lead to gatekeeping and exclusion.

Cecilia Stelzer said she created her own sharing group in Greenpoint after feeling constrained by the common rule requiring every member to live in the group’s neighborhood.

“It’s meant to create a greater sense of community,” Stelzer said. “But it does become a little exclusionary at times, because you have people in poorer communities who could benefit from picking up something they couldn’t otherwise afford from another neighborhood.”

Her group allows people from other neighborhoods to join if they’re willing to travel to Greenpoint to participate.

In 2020, the national project updated its guidance, encouraging admins to find ways to share across boundaries. It said keeping groups too strictly hyperlocal could “replicate historic lines of segregation and other injustices,” and noted some people are tied to multiple places.

Still, the East Village group and many others still follow the older practice. Cervantes said it's to incentivize members to get to know their neighbors and build community.

Defections over rule disagreements aren't uncommon. Alisa Rauner left her Williamsburg Buy Nothing group to start her own sharing group, too, after a disagreement with one of its admins. But there are spats in her new group as well, like when tempers flared over one member getting a better free bike than another.

“It was so ugly how it turned out,” Rauner said. But getting stuff for free is so hard to pass up that even disagreements like this don’t make a big splash, especially when, Rauner said, the sense of community is usually strong.

Others told stories about members secretly reselling free items, a big no-no and members being in more than one group — another contentious rule originally designed to stimulate participation by giving members a personal stake in one group. On another group, a debate raged in the comments of a post over whether giving away free palo santo constituted cultural appropriation.

Despite the rules and the occasional drama, everyone interviewed for this story said the groups are worth it.

And sometimes people like La Rainne Pasion find more than free stuff. Like the time she picked up a bundle of free crochet materials.

“I picked it up and someone else from the Buy Nothing group reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I know how to crochet. I can teach you. Let’s meet up at a cafe,’” Pasion said.

Pasion did and they’re still friends four years later.