I recently discovered this movement thru this article, there’s also a page on Wikipedia.

It seems very interesting to me since it’s basically decentralized proactive anti-capialism mutual-aid. I really think in-real-world decentralized projects like this may be the single most efficient “weapon” we have today.

Do you have any experience with this? I feel like RRFMs are more suitable in big cities and not in little ones, but happy to be wrong about it.

  • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net
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    6 days ago

    I don’t have access to a marketplace like this but I do a lot with our local free groups. Between my household and helping some neighbors cleaning out their homes, and relocating a fair bit of corporate ewaste, we’ve given away thousands of items. We’ve also obtained quite a bit of stuff we would have otherwise had to buy.

    We’ve definitely run into resellers a few times, especially with electronics and big-ticket items. With an online group I can vet them if I’m really worried about the fate of the item - sometimes for something really nice that a lot of people want, I’ll check someone’s profile and if it’s nothing but them claiming expensive electronics, I might pass it to the person who gives at least some stuff away. But I also recognize that the folks who are asking for lots of stuff and aren’t offering up much might just be in hard times and need groups like this the most. So I try to err on the side of giving stuff to whoever can take it.

    Most of the time I just want the thing gone and as long as I’m not worried they’ll throw it out themselves, if a reseller will take it and find a home for it, that’s fine by me. For a handful of items, like special brackets for wireless access points, I deliberately gave them to someone I suspected was reselling because I knew they’d do a better job finding a destination for them on eBay than I would in our local free group.

    In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill, and I suppose resellers are a just a scammy, middleman part of the stuff-moving ecosystem that gets these items to someone who wants them. Even at a reseller’s markup, having this stuff circulating in communities instead of sitting in a landfill reduces demand for new products and hopefully diminishes - even just a little - how much has to be extracted.

    • keepthepace@slrpnk.net
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      6 days ago

      In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill

      A commendable goal and indeed you don’t care much if people reuse or resell in that context. However if your goal is to create and grow a bubble of non-merchant economy, the problem becomes different.

      I recognize that it is unavoidable that some people may resell and it should not be a show stopper, but it should be part of the thought around how to set it up.