In 1994, the WELL was purchased from owners the Point Foundation (the successor to the Whole Earth organization) and NETI, Larry Brilliant's defunct computer conferencing software business. The buyer, Rockport shoe heir Bruce Katz, was well-meaning. He upgraded all the infrastructure and hired a staff. But his intention to franchise the WELL didn't meet with the warmest reception from the WELL community. Let's just say that there was a communication mismatch between the community and the new owner.



Panicked that our beloved cyber-home was going to mutate into McWell, a group of WELLbeings organized to form The River, which was going to be the business and technical infrastructure for a user-owned version of the WELL. Since the people who talk to each other online are both the customers and the producers of the WELL's product, a co-op seemed the way to go. But the panic of 1994 exacerbated existing animosities - hey, it isn't a community without feudin' and fightin'! - and the River turned into an endless shareholders meeting that never achieved a critical mass. Katz sold the WELL to Salon. Why and how Salon kept the WELL alive but didn't grow it is another story. After the founders and Katz, Salon was the third benevolent absentee landlord since its founding. It's healthy for the WELLbeings who remain - it looks like around a thousand check in regularly, a couple of hundred more highly active users, and a few dozen in the conversation about buying the WELL - to finally figure out how to fly this thing on their own.

In 1985, it cost a quarter of a million dollars for the hardware (A Vax 11/750, with less memory than today's smartphones), and required a closet full of telephone lines and modems. Today, the software that structures WELL discussions resides in the cloud and expenses for running the community infrastructure include a bookkeeper, a system administrator, and a support person. It appears that WELL discussions of the WELL's future today are far less contentious and meta than they were fifteen years ago. A trusted old-timer - one of the people who drove me to cancer treatments - is handling negotiations with Salon. Many, many people have pledged $1000 and more - several have pledged $5000 and $10,000 - toward the purchase.

The WELL has never been an entirely mellow place. It's possible to get thrown out for being obnoxious, but only after weeks of "thrash," as WELLbeings call long, drawn-out, repetitive, and often nasty meta-conversations about how to go about deciding how to make decisions. As a consequence of a lack of marketing budget , of the proliferation of so many other places to socialize online, and (in my opinion) as a consequence of this tolerance for free speech at the price of civility (which I would never want the WELL to excise; it's part of what makes the WELL the WELL), the growth of the WELL population topped out at around 5000 at its height in the mid-1990s. It's been declining ever since. If modest growth of new people becomes economically necessary, perhaps the atmosphere will change. In any case, I have little doubt that the WELL community will survive in some form. Once they achieve a critical mass, and once they survive for twenty-five odd years, virtual communities can be harder to kill than you'd think.