The Life Wiki referenced in the article strongly implies that indeed some remnant of that time lived in the Life subculture. Incredible rabbit hole, that wiki.
The point of keeping the LifeCA list private was to dodge spammers and keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. This very successfully avoided the terrible drowned-in-spam fate of the Usenet group comp.theory.cell-automata, so that was good -- but it made it quite difficult for newcomers to figure out who to talk to, or what interesting problems had been solved or were still open.
When the conwaylife.com forums showed up in 2009, it turned out that there were much better ways of suppressing spam, and a lot of new energy entered the field.