The end of an era quietly occurred Thursday when Yahoo! deleted the 20-year-old Route 66 group and hundreds of other Yahoo Groups, a day later than the announced deletion date of Dec. 15.
However, it appears the once-influential group is rising like a phoenix at the MeWe platform. Longtime group moderator Mike Ward said Saturday more than 1,300 have signed up at the Route 66’s group new virtual home.
At its peak, the group on Yahoo! had about 2,000 members. The fact MeWe has gained that many former Yahoo! group members so quickly seems to signal a viable future.
While the new platform somewhat resembles Facebook, Ward said MeWe seems to have fewer of the “disagreeable” aspects of Facebook, including spam and advertising.
Yahoo! said a year ago it would remove all uploaded content from all its groups, which signaled it soon would shut them down.
The Route 66 Group moderators in January announced a migration to the MeWe platform. The group on Yahoo! also changed its banner to list the URL of the MeWe site.
The original Route 66 e-group, which was founded in 1999 by Greg Laxton and later migrated to Yahoo!, proclaimed to be “the place on the Internet to ‘talk 66.’” And talk they did: More than 8,000 posts were recorded in 2003, including 1,191 in July.
The group played a crucial role in the formation of the impactful but now-defunct Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. National Historic Route 66 Federation founder David Knudson led a letter-writing campaign to persuade Congress to pass legislation to fund the program.
The group also was where the Route 66 e-group breakfast and other gatherings were organized, mostly during Route 66 festivals.
The main culprit in the group’s downfall was the rise of Facebook and other social media during the late 2000s. The number of posts on the Route 66 group dropped by about 50% by 2009. By 2014, it struggled to generate even 100 posts in a month.
Ward said he asked for and received a full download of the Route 66 Yahoo Group archive. However, he said it’s a file that’s difficult to convert into a user-friendly format.
(Screen capture of the Route 66 Yahoo Group home page in October 2019)
After trying a couple of different platforms, MeWe seemed the best. And it works pretty well. It’s security and privacy safeguards are, in my opinion, superior to anything you will find on facebook. As an early member to sign up, it’s been fun to watch the volume of posts grow.