I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it’s just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There’s no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me stuff that I’m not even following. This is not even something that I am actively a part of! It’s some random group. So what’s the point of following a group or liking a page, if they’re just going to show you random stuff anyway?
Like, wtf happened to this website?
The solution is to keep using craigslist - it still exists and gets some activity. Ensure that it gets more.
This. If people really want to buy something they will check all available websites for the item(s) they’re looking for. I still use CL exclusively and refuse to touch FB Marketplace even with a burner account because it requires a phone number.
I have never been on Facebook, never even been on the website.
The day it started I told my college-age family that it was a privacy nightmare. They called me paranoid.
Facebook’s Shadow profile on you doesn’t care whether you have an account or visited their site.
Fair, but you can do a lot to limit what data it has, like using extensions like “Facebook Container” on Firefox to block tracking across various sites. It’s not going to prevent your grandma from adding you as a grandchild and your parents from linking you to themselves, but it can do a lot to limit how bad the tracking is.
It is a privacy nightmare. However if you only use it for keeping up with distance friends it is a useful tradeoff. However because they must have so much private information to be useful for that purpose you need to ensure they never have any other purpose. Which is why I won’t use marketplace or groups - there are alternatives that don’t already have private information.
Fortunately, my area has a popular classifieds section at a local newspaper website that everyone seems to have standardized on. I guess people probably also use Facebook, but the local classifieds has a ton of listings.
So if Craigslist is essentially dead in your area, check the classifieds in whatever newspapers are popular in your area, maybe there’s another relatively popular option. And regardless of what you do, it’s totally fine to make posts in multiple places, so make a Craigslist post and updated it alongside whatever one you end up using.
