Craigslist has run on one idea since the nineties. Categories, listings, a wall you post to and scroll through. It is unfashionable and it still moves an enormous amount of furniture, and its restraint about design is a large part of why people trust it.
Notapub works from the other end. You say what you want or what you have, once, in plain words, and the people it fits come to you. Here is where the two actually differ.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
Craigslist took down personals across every city in March 2018, hours after the United States Congress passed the law usually called FOSTA. The notice it left up is two paragraphs long and ends: "Hopefully we can bring them back some day." More than eight years later they are still gone. Missed connections survived, so the wall where people looked for each other is now a wall where they look for the person they saw on a train.
That is the want Notapub carries, and carries as an ordinary case rather than a legal exposure, because nothing here is a public solicitation posted to a city board. You write what you are looking for in a person, in your own words, and it is matched against what other people wrote about themselves.
Every listing has to be filed somewhere, and the filing is the product. That is fine for a couch, which is unambiguously furniture. It falls apart for the things people most need another person for. Someone who has done an artist visa without a lawyer. A cofounder who has already failed at this once. A person who reads Tamil and would sit with your grandmother for an hour a week. There is no box for any of it, so it goes in the wrong box or it never gets written.
Posting also costs money in the categories where it matters most: jobs run from about ten to seventy-five dollars depending on the city, dealer vehicle listings and gigs and services carry small fees, and apartments cost five dollars in New York, Chicago and Boston. Notapub takes plain sentences, charges nothing, and does not need to know which of its categories your sentence belongs to, because it does not have any.
A wall only works while you are standing in front of it. You scan the category today, find nothing, and come back tomorrow, and the good listing that appeared at four in the morning was gone by the time you looked. The same property makes it easy to work: researchers at NYU Tandon who studied rental scams found Craigslist flags fewer than half of them, and the fakes stay up for hours, which is long enough. Verifying who you are talking to falls entirely on you.
What you write on Notapub keeps working after you close the app. Someone who joins next month and has exactly your thing can still be matched to you, without you having checked anything in the meantime. That is the difference between a noticeboard and a standing request, and it is most of the ten-fold gap: one sentence written once against a category checked daily forever.
Craigslist puts your listing on a public page and hides your email behind a relay. Notapub does not have listings, but it is worth being exact rather than reassuring here, because the honest answer is not that nothing of yours is ever visible. What you say you want or have can appear on a public profile page, which is how someone searching the open web finds you at all. Your name, your phone number and your exact location never appear there. The most precise place it will ever show is a city.
You can also switch that page off entirely and keep using everything else, and deleting your account removes it. If you would rather be found only by people already inside Notapub, that is a setting, not a compromise.
For finding people, yes, including the case Craigslist stopped serving in 2018. For buying and selling it works too, though Craigslist is still deeper for local secondhand goods in most cities.
Yes, on iPhone, Android and the web, for ages thirteen and up. There are no posting fees in any category, because there are no categories.
What you said you want or have, and a city-level area, on a public page you can switch off. Never your name, your number or where exactly you are.