Topica

» see topica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkish internet community life happened on forums, not mailing lists. i was on donanimhaber and frmtr, building signatures with my hardware list under every post. the Anglo web had this other habit, the email list, where a whole group lived in your inbox instead of on a page. Topica was one of the big hosts for that habit, and it was never really my habit. i knew the shape of it more than the site itself.

Topica launched in 1998 out of San Francisco, founded by Ariel Poler. in 1999 it bought Liszt, the hand-built directory that had been indexing tens of thousands of email lists since 1995, and folded it into a free service where anyone could start a newsletter or a discussion group. at its height it claimed sixty million subscribers and was pushing billions of messages a month. for a while it was one of the default answers to the question of where you host a mailing list.

the problem was what the free service pulled in. Topica got a name for tolerating spammers, and once enough junk flowed through its servers, other mail administrators simply blocked it. a mailing-list host whose mail your subscribers never receive is not a host at all. the business drifted toward paid marketing tools while the free lists rotted, and on the twenty-ninth of July 2014 Topica shut the free discussion and newsletter service down for good.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

before Slack, before the subreddit, a lot of internet communities lived in email. you joined a list, and every message from every member landed in your inbox, and you replied and everyone got that too. Topica made that easy for people who could not run a mail server, which in 1999 was almost everyone. Liszt was the phone book for all of it, and Topica bought the phone book.

~ the postmortem ~

spam did not kill Topica in one blow, it strangled it slowly. every spammer who set up a free list made Topica's mail a little more toxic to receive, and every block from a big provider made the honest lists a little more useless. by the time the free service closed in 2014 it was mostly a memory with a login page. the email list did not die with it. it just moved to services that guarded their reputation more carefully.

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