Back in the day, there were no dedicated places to talk about spindles. If you discussed them on the spinning lists, wheel spinners would complain that they weren’t interested. It seemed that we needed our own place to discuss them, so that we could share the excitement of the new spindles we’d found. And back then, there were a lot of new spindle makers and new designs. I decided to start a list just for us. I’d have people send me their posts and I would manually put them together into a post that I emailed to the folks that were interested. Responses would show up in the next day’s post. It was work, but it was fun. Eventually, I found some software that would create the posts for me and used that for awhile. Then someone on the list offered a place on their own server, so we tried that. Then companies came out with email groups. They kept getting bought out by Yahoo, so eventually we wound up there. I never liked Yahoo. I hated dealing with it, but it was convenient for folks, so we stayed.
I have noticed that people are not using email as much as before. A lot of that traffic went to social media and sites like Ravelry. Participation on the list dropped off. I had a monthly reminder for people to talk about their projects, but that didn’t seem to help. And I didn’t spend as much time as before participating. I talked about closing the list last year, but people wanted to keep it going awhile longer. After almost a year of no traffic, I closed it this week. Thank you to all that participated! I hope you continue to spin and enjoy your spindles.
