Back on July 9, 1991, I started the Liberal-judaism Mailing List. That list was intended as a place “where liberal jews (Reform, Reconstructionist, Secular Humanist) can discuss issues without fear of attacks about the legitimacy of their movements with respect to the Orthopractic point of view.” The list was moderated, and (quoting again from v1n1) the “only filtering of submissions that I plan to do is (a) removal of Orthodox attacks, (b) removal of prostletyzing (Messianic)s, and requests for possible rewording for clearly imflamatory or offensize material.”
It is now almost 18 years later. There really hasn’t been any discussion on the list since April 2008 (v17n9). I didn’t even bother to start Volume 18 because submissions were so low; I haven’t had any, except for the occasionally mass-cross-posted notice, since then. I must reluctantly conclude that MLJ is dormant, if not dead. I did try to start a parallel community on Livejournal (mlj_on_lj), but it never took off.
I’m writing this not to mourn MLJ. Seventeen years is a long time in Internet years. What I’m wondering if whether the general mailing list model is dying. I know mail.jewish is still going on; I have no idea if SF-LOVERS still exists. My guess is that mailing lists of this form, especially digested moderated lists, have been overtaken by PHP bulletin boards, groups on Facebook, communities on LJ, and all sorts of social networking sites.
I know I’ve moved away from mailing lists. My writing now is here on Livejournal, or short status posts on Facebook. I have a few readers on both from MLJ days. Today I received a subscription request for MLJ (which is what prompted this post), and in that discussion I suggested possibly creating a Facebook group for mail.liberal-judaism, to at least preserve the community. Opinions? Certainly, it wouldn’t be moderated, although I guess membership could require approval.
