After several months of consideration, the Route 66 group on Yahoo!, also known as the Route 66 e-group, announced last week it is asking members to migrate to the MeWe platform.
Mike Ward, one of the original e-group’s moderators, stated with the MeWe announcement:
Take a look and give it a chance. I don’t ever see it reaching 2,000 members as the old e-group did but it can still serve a good purpose within the Route 66 community. Besides, if the opportunity ever arises again to have an e-group breakfast it’s where people would go to get information and sign up.
On MeWe, Ward wrote .io also was considered as a platform. He explained why he favored MeWe:
I know there were people who preferred .io but there have been more postings on MeWe and more subscribers on MeWe. There have even been people who have unsubscribed from .io.
For those who say MeWe reminds them too much of Facebook I can see the visual similarity but there’s really little else.
The .io platform will be delisted but not abandoned. This is to keep the name from being used for some other purpose that might cause confusion.
As of Saturday afternoon, the Route 66 E-group on MeWe had more than 75 members. That number will rise. The page contains dozens of posts or comments from members.
It certainly has a cleaner, more attractive look and works better with photos and videos. The Yahoo! group’s appearance was antiquated, to be charitable.
Yahoo! announced late last year it was disallowing uploads of content, a surefire signal it eventually will pull the plug on the 20-year-old site.
The Route 66 group on Yahoo! rightfully once claimed to be “the place on the Internet to ‘talk 66.'” More than 8,000 posts were recorded in 2003, including 1,191 in July alone, and it had nearly 2,000 members.
The group also became a focal point in the establishment of the impactful but now-defunct Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. National Historic Route 66 Federation founder David Knudson shepherded a letter-writing campaign to lobby Congress to pass legislation for the program.
In addition, the group was where the aforementioned Route 66 e-group breakfast and similar gatherings were organized.
The big culprit in the original e-group’s fall was the rise of Facebook and other social media during the late 2000s. The number of posts on the Route 66 group had been roughly halved by 2009 and fell off a cliff by 2014.
On a good note, Ward wrote that Yahoo provided him a download of the thousands of comments on the original e-group. He stated “a lot of it is in a format that’s difficult to do anything with” but indicated he might do something user-friendly with that data in the future.
At the least, it’s saved for posterity in case Yahoo! deletes the group as anticipated.
One selling point (pun intended) of MeWe is it pledges to maintain users’ privacy and not sell data. Using the #Not4Sale hashtag, it proclaims: “No ads, no targeting, and no newsfeed manipulation” — clearly a swipe at Facebook.
The points are driven home by this video:
Fair warning: Such pledges often prove fleeting, especially when a social media group ends up being purchased by another.
(Screen-capture image of the Route 66 e-group page on MeWe)
It is very unlikely that I will open yet another online account, in order to continue seeing Route 66 postings. A volunteer group I belong to was fed up with Yahoo!, and moved to .io with no untoward repercussions. The whole character of comments will change with the move to MeWe. I do not see them being as constructive or concerned for “the Mother Road” as most of those I have seen here.
I have a dislike for (anti)social media networks, mainly for allowing those posting to not use their real names and to hide behind fictional noms de plume. Another reason for saying, “Farewell – and thanks for all the fish” [Douglas Adams].
I joined it as the official replacement for the old Yahoo eGroup. But that’s all I will use it for, most likely.
It will be as good as the members and moderators keep it, Eric. It’s not just an open public forum. You have to request access, be granted it, and maintain it in good standing. If you join and prove to be a P.I.T.A., I would expect to get bounced. I run a forum, and myself and the moderators keep it clean and on-topic. It’s not hard to do.
I’m glad this is being discussed here. I’m one who signed up for both MeWe and groups.io, but then deleted my .io account when the decision was made for MeWe. Everything I have to say here I’ve already said on MeWe but since we’re discussing it here, too, my musings:
I’m glad to learn that the decision is made and that we are now moving forward. Yahoo WILL do away with groups entirely at some point; it’s a virtual certainty. Corporations don’t take steps like that unless they mean to go all the way. I’m on my way out of Yahoo, anyway, though I might leave my e-mail as a junk address. I did nothing else on Yahoo except read group mail. I’ve already unsubscribed from all my groups except the Route 66 E-Group. The distinction between news, non-news (trivialities & irrelevancies), fake news (lies & propaganda), and advertising has disappeared on Yahoo.
Facebook has been like the cyborg: “You will be assimilated; resistance is futile.” We keep hearing about security breaches and snooping. We keep hearing about how privacy issues are being addressed and promises that things will change. NOTHING about FB will change until Mark Zuckerberg is clapped into Siamese bracelets and dragged away to an all-expense-paid vacation at the Crossbar Hotel.
I, for one, find FB an unsuitable forum for discussing Route 66 topics. It’s too graphic intensive and it scrolls too fast. There’s nothing wrong with graphics, or course. Photographs can be powerful documentary resources. A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, and showing someone a picture is a sometimes much easier than trying to explain something by typing a thousand words into a stupid little text-box with character limits.
But pictures alone don’t suffice. Serious, in-depth Route 66 research and discussion can only happen on a forum that it conducive to actual conversation. Petty little “soundbites” and “tweets” are rarely of any substantial assistance.
User anonymity is irrelevant unless someone is cyber-trolling or being otherwise rude. I’ve seen a couple of those come & go, and when they have, the moderators have acted quickly, so I don’t see a problem. I’m content to “coast under the radar” (I hope) as an anonymous and disembodied net-persona. The ONLY thing that matters to me is what I can get on that screen: accuracy/quality of information, expressed elegantly (and civilly) in writing, and my ability to reason (unreliable as that sometimes is). Anything else is irrelevant and I don’t bother with users who won’t reciprocate in these ways.
I do worry that too many groups will result in affiliates becoming spread out and factionalized due to lack of communication. I see this happening on FB, where there are over one hundred Route 66 groups, and three with the name “Route 66.” That’s why the Yahoo! Route 66 E-group was so good. It provided a central point for the communication, a “clearing house” for reliable information.
I don’t mean to throw a pall on things but I suspect we should probably face the fact that most of the members of the old Yahoo! E-group probably won’t make the switch to MeWe. We are rebuilding from scratch. The days of membership in the thousands are gone, at least for the foreseeable future.
In the comparison between MeWe and .io, I noticed that .io had a database feature that MeWe lacks. I thought that had potential; that the Route-66 group could turn that into a valuable resource. But there are other ways of doing that.
I look forward to reading others’ posts about their experiences and the kind of in-depth discussion from which we can all learn. I’ll be hanging around as long as there is a group like this one.