Facebook Groups is the largest thing of its kind. Almost any interest, any neighborhood and any secondhand market already has a group, usually several, and a good one is genuinely hard to replace. The volunteers who run them are doing unpaid civic work at real scale.
Notapub has no groups. You write what you want or what you have, and the people it fits reach you. Nobody has to approve you first and nothing has to rank your post above someone else's.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
To ask a question you first find the right group, request to join, answer the membership questions, wait for an admin, and then post under that admin's rules. Each step is reasonable and there are four of them before anyone has read your sentence.
Those admins are volunteers, and the load is not small. Running a group of five to ten thousand members is commonly described as fifteen to twenty-five hours a week without automation tools, which is why the platform built Admin Assist to absorb something like seventy percent of the routine actions. Admins who go quiet get a notice saying the group may be offered to other members. Notapub asks you to write one sentence, and nobody has to volunteer their evenings for it to work.
A group post enters a ranked feed and competes with everything else in it. Posts carrying an external link in the body are reliably shown to far fewer people, which is the entire reason for the folk practice of putting the link in the first comment. Thousands of members does not mean thousands of readers, and there is no way to check which it was.
On Notapub what you wrote is matched to particular people rather than shown to a crowd and hoped over. It also does not expire. A post scrolls out of a group in a day; a sentence here is still being matched next month, so someone who joins later can still be brought to you.
The group you depend on belongs to whoever holds it. When the Buy Nothing Project began enforcing its trademark, thousands of independently run gift groups had to register or rename, and some were removed. Automated moderation has banned longstanding admins and members with no appeal a person ever reads. The platform has also run accounts of its own inside groups: one posted in a mothers' group as though it were a parent of a child in a gifted program, another offered items in a gift group that did not exist.
Nothing about Notapub is a room, so there is nothing to lose access to. Your wants and haves belong to your account, they move with you, and you can delete them or the whole account at any time.
If you want to be around fifty other people who collect the same cameras, read the same arguments every week and recognize the same names, a group is the correct tool and Notapub does not replace it. Ongoing conversation among people who already found each other is exactly what a group is for.
Notapub is for the other case, and it is the more common one: you want a specific thing from a specific person and you do not want to join anything to ask for it. Four gates and a ranked feed against one sentence, with no membership, no waiting for approval and no admin standing between you and the answer.
No. There is nothing to join and nobody approves you. You write what you want and it starts being matched.
Yes. Say what you have and buyers are matched to it, the same way as anything else.
Yes, on iPhone, Android and the web, for ages thirteen and up.