All Buy Nothing groups, no matter what platform they are on, are welcome to stay wherever they are. We, as the project, are not in the Facebook groups, we do not have control over them. FB Admins and group members can participate in this project any way they’d like! People can be in both the app and in a Buy Nothing Facebook group. It’s all good! All sharing is welcome, no matter where it is.

The mission of the Buy Nothing project has always been to make our network of Buy Nothing gift economies as inclusive and accessible as possible. Regarding our new platform, and the new BuyNothing mobile app, please understand that we have learned that so many people are not able to participate in this project because they are not on FB. There are also a growing number of people who are only on FB due to Buy Nothing. They have asked us to create something new.

FB Admins are welcome to register in the app as a Community Builders. Read more about Community Builders here. In terms of work load, we believe you'll find the 'work' in the app is a light lift. Our hope is that Community Builders will continue all of the wonderful community building work to preserve the Buy Nothing ethos and guidelines in the app, and be happy that they no longer need to administer signups and deal with sprouting! If you are a FB Admin, head over to our special page and register as a Community Builder to get recognized in the app. You will also find on that page details around why we built the new platform to be inclusive of everyone, on and off Facebook.

So in summary, share where you want to! The abundance mindset can challenge our scarcity thinking to help us see that there’s plenty for us to share, wherever we are, no matter what venue we use to share. Of course, we hope you’ll join this next chapter of the Buy Nothing experiment with us on our independent app, following our independent spirit, and helping us to build something special for the world that’s uniquely suited for us all.

We are using Community Builder in the new platform in place of Admin. The term Admin was simply a functional definition of the role in FB. We think everyone can agree, in no way does "Admin" capture all that we do in our communities, and it leaves out the inspirational, creative, welcoming role that we all serve. We believe Community Builder best captures this. That is what we all do: build community!

Our special perk gift to you is an advance look into the app so you can start building community before we launch it globally to the rest of the world. We wanted to give each of you some time in the app to welcome your community and get to know the app before our 55,000+ waitlist signups are let in! In the days before Global Launch, you'll be able to show the world just how talented you are at modeling the unique behaviors of Buy Nothing Giving, Asking, and Gratitude.

Community Builders are role models who live the Buy Nothing culture, encourage sharing, welcome new participants,
... and are agents of good.

We are currently building a special “Community” screen in the app which show the photo and name of the nearest Community Builder to the user, allowing the user to reach out to you via PM if they have questions or to share their gratitude for all you do. The Community screen will also display information about the community (e.g. # of other members and posts) and will show photos and names of other members around them. Over time, most of us will have a co-Community Builder around us to connect with, a peer! We have huge hopes and ideas about this Community area of the app, and are looking forward to your feedback!

You’ll model with posts, encouraging creativity, you can welcome people around you and answer questions. You’ll have a special hangout and landing page on our website with sample posts you can use, to engender the Buy Nothing culture in your community. And, we’ll continue developing new features just for you. Imagine, over time, having an easy way to track Round Robins, list and find items in a lending library, or help with seeding the giving in nearby communities that could use some of the excess unwanted items from your community! We want to see the circular economy come to life and thrive in the BuyNothing app, where nothing goes to waste and community members near and far are held in our collective arms.

In the future, we envision special tools that are available only to Community Guides, tools like the ability to flag great content for other communities to see the joy that’s happening in your part of the world.

Yes, the Fine Print is still the Fine Print. Our utmost priority is to preserve the Buy Nothing culture. We’re using the same guidelines as before, and they’ve been updated for our new platform. We no longer need to 'work around' the changes Facebook sends our way. The Fine Print for the app is now called “Community Guidelines”.

Our hope is that you all will continue to guide members to follow our rules and guidelines as you have been. A first step, as always, is to comment on the post to ask for a correction, or private message the user if applicable.

Reporting a Post or a User: If a user is in clear violation and not correcting the issue, we ask that you use the Report feature in the app (three sideways dots next to a User or Post) to send our Support Team the post and user information so that we can address the violation, including removing the post and potentially removing the user's account. There is more info on this process in our Help section and Safety page.

As a reminder, we have zero tolerance for abuse and will act quickly to remove users and content within 24 hours that violate our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Yes, of course! Both the app and the Facebook groups can and will coexist together. We're already seeing a synergy happening between the two: In some instances the app provides you with a wider sharing footprint than your BN FB group and in others, the app provides you with an even smaller footprint for more hyperlocal sharing, depending on your specific needs.

Yes, while the new bnp.org website is focused on our new sharing platform, we will continue to host all the FB Group specific resources here: bnponfb.org. There are links in our new website to those FB specific resources.

Spring 2022