OneList To Rule Them All

or, Majordomo Blues

Yahoo! has announced that, effective October 28, Yahoo Groups will essentially no longer exist.

The announcement, for me, is both jarring and, um, irrelevant. See, I’m still the list owner for several groups. It’s just that none of the groups have been active for years.

That I’m now explaining all of this via a broadcast email seems especially fitting. Time to review some collective history and get… well… meta.

Message Groups and Listservs

Many, many, many moons ago, people found one another on the Internet (or not even technically on the Internet), and started not-in-real-time conversing with one another. There were forums local to individual BBSs. There was FidoNet and other similar message groups (which as you may recall I’ve recently written about.) There were AOL message forums, and probably also similar forums on Compuserve and Prodigy. And of course there was Usenet.

Then there was the Listserv. I use “Listserv” to refer generically to any of a number of different mailing list software applications, or just, mailing lists. The idea was that you send an email to the listserv address, and that email goes out to all 200 people who are also on the list with you. Maybe you get all of the emails individually or maybe bundled into a daily digest. The software would tend to be hosted by educational institutions, potentially anywhere in the world, the most common ones including Listserv, Majordomo, Listproc… they all pretty much did the same thing. Many of you didn’t need this history, of course. But those of you who did are probably wondering what the hell all of this was about.

Well, for me, it was about music. The lists I got on were usually band-specific. The two which occupied most of my attention were the Pavement list and the Postcard list (which covered Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, and strayed out into the greater alt-country universe.)

The Pavement list, in particular, was not just some kind of diversion for me. These really were my people. I met several of the frequent posters. Some of them, today, over 20 years later, are still acquaintances, maybe people who will pop up in my Facebook feed, maybe even people who are Pokémon buddies. The Pavement list was a vital center of activity for me.

And I will emphasize here that I always preferred the email list to a web-based message forum. Such forums started to come around in the ‘90s but I tended to think they were mostly a mess. I always thought just receiving email was better. It was easier to manage. You didn’t have to click through so much crap. You could keep on top of things. I have long been worried about “missing something” and I always felt it was easier to miss things on a web forum than with an email list.

The one problem was that if there wasn’t an existing list for something of interest to you, and you didn’t have access to a university’s Listserv or Majordomo or whatever, you were kind of out of luck. Then one day that all changed.

OneList and eGroups

OneList debuted in 1997. I think I found it in 1998. It was a free service which allowed you to create your own mailing lists.

I created several.

The three most popular ones that I created were bts (Built To Spill); spoon; and elephant6, for the broader Elephant 6 collective, which included Apples In Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, and most famously today, Neutral Milk Hotel. None of these bands or groups of bands had their own lists. At some point each of the lists had hundreds of people, and the elephant6 list in particular had several hundreds, and was an extremely busy list.

OneList, in 1999, was absorbed by eGroups. Not much changed. eGroups was still a free service, and now there were a lot more groups out there.

All of this coincided with the end of my college days and beginning of my grad school days. It’s weird to think about now, but around 1999, I was pretty heavily involved in elephant6 happenings. The group actually wound up pulling together a tribute CD which included Steve Keene cover art and which got distributed by Polyvinyl, an actual record label. I have an Executive Producer credit; this, incidentally, is how I learned what an Executive Producer is: a guy who manages a mailing list.

In 2000, eGroups was acquired by Yahoo!

The Early Yahoo! Years and Green Party Lists

Yahoo! as of 2000 was not really used by anyone as a search engine. I am frankly not even sure what other services it offered. But it bought out eGroups and flipped it all over to Yahoo Groups. And my involvement in managing lists just increased from there.

There was a period of time around 2003 where I was still getting email from old-school lists like Postcard, and my own music-based Yahoo lists were still active, plus I was getting a boatload of email from Green Party related lists. At some point in all that, in an attempt to “streamline” communications, I wound up setting up unique lists for a lot of different state party committees. Add up the music lists, the Green Party lists, and a couple other random things, and I probably owned 20-25 Yahoo lists all at once.

My email volume was insane.

Even getting just digests from some lists, I was getting hundreds of emails a day, and plowing through them all. Then in 2003 when I wound up on the Green Party’s National Committee, I got onto their lists too, which drove the email volume even higher.

At some point I simply had to scale back. I made a fateful decision: I unsubscribed from the Postcard list. Most of the music lists I managed were trickling off - with elephant6, a lot of the volume moved over to a web forum - and so my inbox was no longer inundated with music-related messages, only party-related messages.

By 2005, I’d been involved in email-based lists for a decade. I was incredibly comfortable with the method. We liked to think of the National Committee as somehow being akin to the U.S. Congress (what the hell were we thinking?) In effect, the National Committee was in session 24 hours a day, and I was always on the floor, and always able to give a speech. For that matter, the state party was in session 24 hours a day as well. I gained a reputation based around the volume and especially the length of my emails.

For some people email was kind of a proto version of texting, a way to send quick messages. For me it was a way to engage in stream-of-conscious thinking. It’s often several paragraphs down before I can really get clicking with an idea and start to tie things together. This is why a blog works for me, and why Substack works for me, and why LiveJournal worked well for me. It also explains why I’ve long resisted Twitter and have had an uneven relationship with how to use Facebook. I think through things by writing through things. I can’t do that on Twitter. But I could also do that by email, nevermind that other people weren’t doing the same.

In my mind, the exchange of extra long emails is not that far off from the exchange of long letters in previous centuries, or even the exchange of ideas in, say, an 18th century French salon. It’s a method for people to crash lengthy ideas off of one another. Maybe this could happen in a graduate seminar too. But you know where it doesn’t seem to happen? In daily life.

It so happens that many of my closest friends - the very people most likely to humor me through a stream of conscious exposition on something, or even to fully engage in such a thing - live many hours away. It also so happens that, for the most part, I dislike talking on the telephone. In part this is because I’ve been on so many atrocious conference calls over time. But it’s also just not a great method for me. It’s different in person, when you can take visual cues. I just don’t often get that chance. And even when I do see people, it’s rarely in an extremely laid back setting either. There are often several people around, and it’s often part of some kind of whirlwind trip.

Writing is a way around all of this. It’s a way to get ideas down, and along the way to convey other things besides those which may have been the most immediate things at hand. When I first read about the impending Yahoo! shutdown, I wasn’t thinking about how I haven’t seen so-and-so in ages. But this stuff is connected. Writing through it all brings these thoughts to the surface.

The Decline of the Mailing List

Best as I can tell, the Green Party still uses their mailing lists rather heavily. Maybe not all of them, but certainly some of them. So it’s not like the mailing list is completely dead.

But all of mine are. I’m not a member of a single active discussion list. I do happen to still own some Yahoo! lists, but, well… one of them hasn’t even had a post in it since 2005.

For me, I suppose the listserv function has mostly been replaced by Facebook Groups. It’s hardly the same thing, though. And it’s unfortunate, because it’s on Facebook, and it’s so abundantly obvious how corrupt Facebook is at this point. Take those groups away though and what functionality do we have left, such that we all even know to use it together?

More broadly, the listserv function has simply been squeezed out by social media. Sure, I’ve had people tell me that they’ve met other simpatico types via Twitter, so I guess there’s a way for such things to happen. And in the not too distant past I’ve met people via Facebook groups or events. Generally, though, these things aren’t going to be nearly as effective for me, certainly not today, unless it’s a group which is very geographically localized, like a parents’ group for the local school. Not only am I separated from a forum method which works well for me, I’m also separated from a forum organizing concept which works well for me. I’ve never found a music group via Facebook which was remotely like Postcard or the Pavement list in terms of being something to identify with.

Now, I freely admit that the content liable to interest me arguably isn’t out there anymore. Pavement, after all, hasn’t released an album in 20 years. So to some extent, this whole thing is just the ramble of an old man lamenting the loss of how things used to be. Nothing to see here. Move along.

But I think there are important points to be made here. Even when we try to embrace new interests, the methods are just so very different. I can like a band on Facebook. I can even join a group dedicated to the band. But the kinds of interactions are not only different, they’re also caught up in the mad wash of other content that defines Facebook. Listservs used to seem like communities to me. Even Facebook groups which serve physical geographic neighborhoods don’t really feel like communities to me. (Maybe though that’s because every such group I’ve been in seems to revolve around alcohol outings?)

I also have to admit that other kinds of forums seem to be very successful at bringing people together from around the world. Unfortunately what I hear about tends to be things like white supremacy forums. Now maybe it’s also very possible for people to find bright corners of the Internet as well as dark ones. But the incessant nature of social media, the constant churn of the news cycle, the endless streams of everything, it all makes any brightness feel blaring. I’m certainly not looking for a dark corner! But even if I do find a nice little space, it sure feels overwhelmed by everything else in my feed. It’s not hard to imagine these retreating people having been blinded by the light, cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night.

(Incidentally. Manfred Mann’s cover of “Blinded by the Light”. You know what I’m talking about. It is one of the worst things ever created. It is unbelievably wretched, and one of the greatest examples of the idiocy of the classic rock canon.)

My point is, when the web is so dense that you can’t distinguish individual threads, you may still technically be connected, but the meaning of connection can easily be lost. This is hardly a new thought, of course. But if you’re no more closely connected to your loved ones than you are to Nihilist Arby’s, well, maybe something is amiss.

Anyway, now that I’ve mentioned Nihilist Arby’s, it probably means I’ve lost steam and need to wrap this up, so…

As a late-stage member of Gen X, square in the Irony Pocket, you can probably imagine what I’m going to do with this post. I’m going to share it on the remaining Yahoo! Groups that I still own, even that group which hasn’t had a post since 2005. After all, it’s not like the intent of those groups is entirely lost. I saw Built To Spill play just three months ago! There are still people out there. Maybe they’re feeling some of the same kind of weird disconnection that I am. Maybe they’ll get to this paragraph, where I’m literally writing about them, and will have some kind of reaction. Maybe they will want to be Pokémon buddies too. Maybe they will want to defend Manfred Mann, though doing so would be the ultimate fool’s errand.

Well, I’m out here, somewhere, and will be even come December, when Yahoo! eradicates our shared past. Sign up for my freaking Substack already. Or just find me on Twitter where I am with everyone else. I’m easy to find - @PhilHuckelberry - so there you go. I’ll tell you about seeing Built To Spill and Spoon each for the 10th time in recent months, or I’ll tell you about the Chicago Red Stars, or I’ll tell you about wrong-way concurrencies, or whatever.

I guess what it boils down to is this: If you were somehow moved by a circumlocutious ode to Yahoo! Groups, then maybe we really should stay connected, and maybe together, we can brighten the corners, or, I should say, :L