Freecycle is great. Its a hipster style movement to reduce waste from going into landfills, and instead - recycle it by giving items to someone else for free. Most lists are run regionally, metros might have a number of different ones per city or per county or both. (For instance, there exist "Broward Freecycle" (a county), "Tamarac Freecycle" and "Coral Springs Freecycle" (both suburbs) and also "Fort Lauderdale Freecycle" a metro area.)
Overall I've found CL to be filled with scammers, criminals, ripoff artists, and any manner of otherwise objectionable people. While usually with Freecycle you don't meet anybody, just go to the curb or on the porch. If you do meet, its typically miserly old ladies, sewing-circle folk, old hippies or granola peeps, or sometimes just plain white trash. I've never felt like anyone I've met from freecycle might be scoping the place out. But then again my CL dealings usually have me going to a public place anyways.
So in summary - FC is a little less shady than CL. Often the only requirement to post up a WANTED: is to have posted up and actually given away any item at all.
- but never used CL to give stuff away. 
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