Facebook spontaneously banned me from their marketplace some years ago. I have never used it. Don’t think I’ve even checked it out.

So I hear, its a shame that Craigs List isn’t still popular. No ads, no AI slop, never have to relearn the interface, just works.

And Craigslist search is much better.

I swear, Facebook makes their marketplace search shitty on purpose, so you'll spend more time on their site searching for things.

I got a few of my favorite things for free off of craigslist. I dislike that their app is not on F-Droid

there's a cost to anonymity, and one of them is people like to check buyers profiles to see if they are rmeotely serious buyers or not.

user to user selling sites are already packed with low ballers, bots and fake accounts. some people would like to not even interact with them.

anonymity is also attracts fake listings more. not that fbm doesnt have them but its usually very obvious when a listing is fake, if not, the profile its attached to.

I still use it, it's great. Unlike FBM, you can actually search for things and use filters and have saved searches that notify you when someone posts something that triggers a saved search. Facebook intentionally gimps their "find" functionality so you have to scroll through generic categories and look at a thousand things you don't want just to find the one thing you do. This is because it keeps you on their site - everything about Facebook is such a fucking turd sandwich.

Craigslist's problem is they just don't do anything but exist as near as I can tell. They don't update their UI (which I actually appreciate). They allow people to post the same listing every fucking day which is super annoying. They do nearly nothing to deal with scammers and bad user behavior (like storefronts claiming to be individuals) and rather than deal with that, people just left because Facebook might suck but most of the people on it who might contact you are at least verifiable.

So Craigslist is kind of threadbare, but there's still a good bit of stuff on it. If you do saved searches that trigger emails and you're patient, you can often get what you want (although I frequently update saved searches to exclude the idiot savants reposting every day).

I feel like it's becoming a bit more popular again now that OfferUp and all their ilk have, believe it or not, shit the bed even worse.

Craigslist is still fully operational and functional, and the only thing that has changed about it is that it doesn't have a personals site anymore.

FOSTA-SESTA. Craigslist shut down the personals section in 2018 and thus effectively killed the majority of traffic to their website.

It's not popular where I am (Scotland). There's nothing for sale in my area at all, except ads for clearly spammy things like spiritual services and some guy who wants people's underwear.