After only two months I have succeeded in joining Freecycle, thanks to the repeated intervention of the Freecycle New Zealand Outreach and Assistance coordinator (who it appears currently also covers Canada!).

Apparently there is an unwritten rule, at least on the Wellington, New Zealand Freecycle list, that you cannot join with an email address that contains "freecycle" in it; no I don't understand why either. Had I known this 2 months ago (eg, when I asked why my application was rejected) then I could easily have subscribed with a different email address. I've suggested that they document this rule, at least in the mailing list description.

So I've signed up as fc@MYDOMAIN, and it was approved this evening. Meanwhile several things which might have gone to Freecycle have gone to other homes. C'est la vie.

ETA 2010-02-24: It's a moderately busy list, with in the order of 20 messages a day, so if you're not actively waiting for something to appear so you can claim it (which I'm told often requires sub-5-minute answers to anything popular) it probably makes sense to switch to the digest view. Given I'm "supply side" at the moment (wanting to give away things, rather than have anything more come into my home), I've switched to digest mode by sending an email to the digest link at the bottom of each email, and responding to the confirmation challenge. (I'm also seriously doing that with the other busier mailing list that I'm on where I'm only skimming the messages; but I'm more likely to wait to retrieve/reply to individual messages there.)

I'm also struck by the fact that an email list is almost certainly the wrong technology for what Freecycle is trying to do -- almost all the messages are "subject line, no body" or at most extremely trivial body. Something more RSS/IRC (or God forbid, Twitter) like that allowed more distribution options would probably work better from a technology point of view. But I guess email is the lowest common denominator technology at this point, so it continues to be (ab)used for all sorts of things that it was never intended to do.

ETA 2010-04-09: And less than two months after I finally got onto it, the Wellington Freecycle list is gone -- after having briefly been renamed "Wellington Recycle IT". As best I can tell from reading between the lines the person running the Wellington Freecycle list disagreed with the Freecycle policy, and decided to strike out alone -- and was then asked to remove the list completely. Supposedly there will be some replacement list eventually, but the whole thing seems rather suboptimal.

Interestingly there is a Wellington, New Zealand page on Freecycle.org, which appears to have several hundred members, but it appears not to allow joining by email any longer -- and various things still refer to Yahoo Groups. It also unclear to me if it is an email list at all, or just a web page into which you have to sign in to check for new listings, etc. There is a My FreeCycle FAQ, which appears to be about all they're saying about the new website version (other than that it is "beta") -- and that implies that it doesn't replace the Yahoo Group, but in the case of Wellington it appears that it does replace the Yahoo Group (or perhaps it simply doesn't work given that there is no Yahoo Group).

ETA, 2010-04-11: Out of the blue I got an email from the New Zealand coordinator for Freecycle advising that the Wellington, NZ, group had closed but that a new Wellington, NZ Freecycle group was going to be created sometime in the next few weeks. So hopefully by sometime in May things will be back on track again. (This presumably also explains the Freecycle page showing a Wellington group, but without a Yahoo group -- as a placeholder until the list gets recreated.)