Consider that Meta’s Marketplace is the largest competitor. Immediately after they launched, they quickly capitalized on their Identity Verification natural monopoly on online social networking. This was ‘pivoted’ into “Identity Verification Assurance” for your average Playstore and iPhone users.
Marketplace wasn’t even easier to use than Craigslist, 99% of the arguments for using it were “it’s safer because it’s less scams”.
I wouldn’t put it beneath Zuck and his bootlickers to pay a few bitcoins to maintain an artifically inflated number of scams on Craigslist.
It reinforces the mistaken belief that scams are driven by anonymity (instead of the truth that you can have all their data and the justice department will look the other way… that’s why they keep doing it until they scam Grant Hudson of McLean, VA).
Anyway, the faster CL dies the sooner Meta consolidates a monopoly on electronic flea marketing or whatever it’s called.
I never stopped buying things on Craigslist. When I still had a Facebook account I used marketplace too, but I’ve always used Craigslist as a resource as well. I purchased 3 pieces of furniture and some eurorack modules in the last 4 months all on Craigslist.
So while I wouldn’t say it is alive and well because it definitely isn’t what it was in its heyday, people still use Craigslist. 3 of the 4 sellers I talked to said they sold on Craigslist because they hate Facebook, the 4th just didn’t really seem interested in conversing with me and just wanted to sell the table.