Anatomy of the ListServ and the push to save it

The abrupt announcement by Vital Communities on August 19 that it was terminating all 38 of its town-based community listservs on August 21 took everyone by surprise. In the couple of days that followed there was an outpouring of emails. Some in Thetford felt disrespected by the scant 48 hours given to list moderators and subscribers to make other arrangements. Others were pained to think of all the connections that would be missed without a town listserv.  

By the time August 21 rolled around, Vital Communities had somewhat changed its tune. Yielding to pressure from listserv moderators from many towns and from their multiple subscribers, Executive Director Ellen Hender wrote that they would continue hosting the town-based listservs "beyond the 8/21 deadline" without indicating when the cutoff date would be. Vital Communities, it seemed, was "working on a revised timeline" and "needed to process the feedback from recent conversations."

Although Vital Communities advised listserv subscribers to sign up for Front Porch Forum, a commercial service, many subscribers are hoping that the listservs can be kept intact and hosted by some other entity. 

In theory that is entirely feasible. 

Thetford's was the first community listserv in the Upper Valley, apart from Lyme's that ran on the Dartmouth server, and was set up in 2003 to run on the free online service Topica which is now defunct. In little over a year the number of subscribers outgrew its Topica platform, and ValleyNet, a Vermont non-profit organization founded in 1994 to provide and expand local internet access in the Upper Valley, became the new host.  

At this juncture in 2004 the listserv was "ported" from Topica to Electric Embers, which remains the provider of the listserv service to this day. Electric Embers runs all of our local community listservs on its server (computer hardware) using open source software. ValleyNet was the listserv host meaning it was the administrator of all the listservs.

In 2015 ValleyNet closed down, and another non-profit, Vital Communities, took over as the host. This transfer was technically simple since Electric Embers remained the service provider. 

When broken down into its parts, the listservs are made up of  (1) the service provider, Electric Embers, that runs all the listservs, manages all the emails and archives all data; (2) the mid-level administrator (host) Vital Communities, that controls various features of the listservs and creates new listservs through settings on the service provider’s server; and (3) local listserv managers that have more limited control through local listserv settings.

When a subscriber emails a posting to the Thetford listserv at [email protected], it is received by an Electric Embers server (a physical computer). The posting is then sent out in an email to all subscribers of the Thetford listserv. This can happen immediately, when the posting is received, or, if individual subscribers choose, the postings can be bundled and sent as a digest once a day. Electric Embers also stores all the lists of subscribers and all the archives for every listserv. Vital Communities does not manage the traffic of messages or storage of data. 

A critical role of Vital Communities, as host to the listservs, is to pay Electric Embers for being the service provider, an expense that the non-profit covers to make listserv access free to community members. Vital Communities can also create new listservs using the address list name@lists.vitalcommunities.org. Neither Vital Communities nor Thetford's local list managers block or censor individual postings. However, in the extreme case of repeated violations of the listserv's posting guidelines, managers can terminate a user's subscription via a command to the Electric Embers server. 

The most straightforward way to keep the listservs alive would be to maintain Electric Embers as the service provider and find another organization to be the host. Electric Embers confirms that this can be done while keeping all the data, subscriber lists, and archives intact. However, finding another non-profit willing to take on this role may be tricky. 

The hope is that savvy and creative individuals are investigating this problem from many different angles, and that Vital Communities will have the grace to allow time for a solution. 

A word about Electric Embers. It is itself a worker-owned co-op; its mission and list of principles concerned with providing public good through internet services can be found here, cover a long list of nonprofits, cooperatives, artists, land trusts, educational projects, grassroots activists, etc. While they do charge for their services, they do so on a sliding scale, so large clients with big budgets, in effect, subsidise the smallest, least wealthy clients.

Vital Communities has encouraged listserv subscribers to turn to Front Porch Forum (FPF) instead. However, there are some basic differences. Listservs administered by Vital Communities run almost entirely on volunteer labor. FPF has a paid staff of 31 according to its 2025 annual report. The listservs never have paid advertisements, whereas  FPF's business model is based on paid ads which appear among the posts. Listservs are open to anybody in any location with an interest in any town. One does not have to ask permission to subscribe to a listserv and the archives are available to any subscriber anywhere who wishes to view them. In other words the listservs are transparent. By contrast,  FPF puts people through a vetting process before they are allowed to sign up and permits people to subscribe only to the forum of a single town. In addition, there is strict moderation on FPF that some feel can stifle political and policy debates, whereas listservs are overseen by local volunteers and are often more relaxed.

Whatever the reason, FPF has not made big inroads in the Upper Valley where towns have mostly stuck with their listservs. Many subscribers hope this will continue to be the case.