Claire Evans welcomes a daily email from a stranger, brought to her inbox via a peculiar community:
The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you’re joining a massive e-mail list. Every day, one person from the list is randomly selected to write one e-mail to everyone else. That’s it. As of this writing, the Listserve has 21,399 subscribers. There has been one email per day since April 16th, 2012. Run by a group of Masters Candidates in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the Listserve emerged from a class exploring new ways of creating conversational spaces online. There were other ideas: chain letters, or a message board for only 100 people at a time. But eventually email’s directness and ease-of-use won out. An email flies straight, circumventing the myriad distractions of other online gatherings, where some voices pack disproportionate clout (or, er, Klout).
She goes on to differentiate the list from other forms of modern social media:
Where Facebook has devalued the word “friend” to the point of worthlessness, Listserve takes the opposite tack: it has imbued “stranger,” with its associations of danger and otherness, with an immediacy much more akin to real friendship. Listservers don’t spam you with vacation photos or cheap pleas for attention. Instead, they share long, personal stories of adversity and dole out big-picture life advice. “With the lottery mechanism slowing down interaction,” says [Listserve co-founder Greg] Dorsainville, “the emails have a pleasant tone: people talk about their own lives, and how they have battled against hardship or achieved success in their life. People share slices of their own identities and what have shaped them.”
The Dish 