Hello to all G+ ...This mass migration of everyone is still really difficult. :(
I signed up on MeWe. But really? I have been posting on G+ for years. I have over 2000 followers. I have collections, monitor groups. In all sincerity... did anyone think of all the all the work and research it takes to form groups and or make collections? Even just everyday posts where you have an audience. Let's not forget about G Chat ... Hangouts. Friends we have made over the years...Even FB has lots of people who leave,,, they are called ghost accounts. . The point is, there is a loyal audience who has gone through the hiccups of G+, changes to make it better when it was not broken. However, we endured and remained faithful.It is going to be an emotional loss to the community.
I would like answers to some questions please,
1. why can't we transfer our friend base with us? Of course, there would be an option if they chose the same platform to go to.
2. I do not want to lose my groups or collections. We worked too hard and we are emotionally and time invested..
3. All these different places to go???? WTH... It is like being orphaned and splitting the family up...
4. When people make this site what it is, I feel that we the people are have been thrown to the curb... Not nice.... who does that?????? Please answer the questions, please...you owe us at least that. I am still getting invites to groups...perhaps some are still oblivious to the shutdown.
I signed up on MeWe. But really? I have been posting on G+ for years. I have over 2000 followers. I have collections, monitor groups. In all sincerity... did anyone think of all the all the work and research it takes to form groups and or make collections? Even just everyday posts where you have an audience. Let's not forget about G Chat ... Hangouts. Friends we have made over the years...Even FB has lots of people who leave,,, they are called ghost accounts. . The point is, there is a loyal audience who has gone through the hiccups of G+, changes to make it better when it was not broken. However, we endured and remained faithful.It is going to be an emotional loss to the community.
I would like answers to some questions please,
1. why can't we transfer our friend base with us? Of course, there would be an option if they chose the same platform to go to.
2. I do not want to lose my groups or collections. We worked too hard and we are emotionally and time invested..
3. All these different places to go???? WTH... It is like being orphaned and splitting the family up...
4. When people make this site what it is, I feel that we the people are have been thrown to the curb... Not nice.... who does that?????? Please answer the questions, please...you owe us at least that. I am still getting invites to groups...perhaps some are still oblivious to the shutdown.
I'm having a great time in mewe, the chat groups are awesome and the people are trusting.
ReplyDeleteThere's a group on MeWe to form connections again but honestly, how many people actually interact with your posts, those are the ones you want to keep, the rest are just lurkers or non existent people
ReplyDeleteI own the Surfing community with 134,800+ members. It sucks that it's going to go up in smoke. Anyway, I can relate.
ReplyDeleteEthan Boyle how many are still active? That's the real people
ReplyDeleteAnswer to all questions is: Google doesn't care.
ReplyDeleteRemember that the next time you see their logo on your screen.
Purple Reign I hooked ip there too...Personally...I find the chat distracting. I love hangouts once a week and I can talk to friends I have knows for years here...but to see chat on every group and some is just not relevant to the topics... it is too much and so are a the smile faces and stuff.. I prefer comments ,,,, you know...
ReplyDeleteEthan Boyle Al the hard work you put into it and and will be gone...who would have known? Right? Google created and collections and groups and now they are of no interest to them...
ReplyDeleteI just opened a group...to voice opinions on... I would love to hear what thousands of dedicated users think too.
ReplyDeleteG+ is closing its doors, are you upset?
In my case, the bulk of my actually active followers went to a diaspora pod (pluspora.com). Only a few hundred out of thousands, but the level of engagement is about the same.
ReplyDeleteThe reason there's no automated way to transfer contacts is because Google+ is a closed system. Back in the day, before G+ even existed, there were attempts to make integrated social media clients that interoperated between Twitter and Facebook etc. But then, Twitter and Facebook decided to ban any such usage. This is what led to the "Federation" of open source alternatives such as diaspora, Mastodon, etc to form their own social media ecosystem entirely separate from the closed system big boys.
I mean, they wanted to give you the interoperability you're hoping for. But the closed garden social media services actively did everything they could to prevent it. Google is no exception in this regard.
If you want to never have to go through this again, I'd suggest looking at the various Federation/Fediverse options - they offer the ability to migrate from pod to pod if you want, and you can even switch from one service to another and still keep your same followees (you'll need to get your followers to switch the address they're pointed to, but they won't need to change services at least).
The biggest ones in terms of user base are diaspora and Mastodon. They're the ones which offer the least smooth ability to migrate from one pod to another, though, and currently they don't directly Federate with each other.
Friendica federates with all of the Federation/Fediverse, and it offers the ability to smoothly migrate from one pod to another via an export/import process.
Hubzilla also federates with all of the Federation/Fediverse, but it's a younger project that's a bit rougher around the edges. It offers the unique ability to have live "clones" across pods so you don't even have to do an export/import process to migrate. In fact, the "clones" automatically kick in as necessary if one pod goes down or gets disconnected from the internet. If you're comfortable with installing the server software, you can even spin up your own personal Hubzilla pod just for yourself so you can have a local "clone". That way, you'll always have a local copy of all your stuff. You could even use it to post/comment/like/etc when your Internet connection goes down. After the internet is connected again, all of your updates will get whooshed out to your other clones (and the federated services of your followers/followees).
If you, like me, don't ever want to go through the prospect of having to export all your posts/Collections/Communities/etc and then ... ehh... doing something with it... well, I'd suggest taking a serious look at Hubzilla's capabilities.
Isaac Kuo Thanks for the input...I have never heard of any of these hubs...so I guess I need to do some homework...
ReplyDeleteBrenda Rebel Angel
ReplyDeleteYou can hide the chats your not interested in, I'm not a fan of the constant emoji notifications, so I turned them off.
It's all about attitude.
Thanks Isaac Kuo you saved me a lot of typing.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad other people are getting this!!
Putting all your eggs in the MeWe basket is just going to lead to the same result again.
You can replicate your communities as pods on the diaspora framework, and migrate the content and users if needed.
You own it.
You are in control.
It's the better way to do social.
Isaac Kuo That comment would make a very good top-level post, FYI.
ReplyDeleteBrenda Rebel Angel We've got time, there's a lot of options, and there are things you can do NOW that will help your move considerably.
ReplyDeleteSee: social.antefriguserat.de - Recommended Practices - PlexodusWiki
It's a set of basic steps:
Exchange permanent contact information with contacts and groups.
Talk over and decide your online / social-media presence after August 2019 Your closest relationships will be your biggest influence: family, friends, work, school, professional, etc.
Make a Google Data Takeout Archive.
Start thinking about your data: what to keep, what you can discard.
Start Assessing Google+ alternatives.
Start developing a goal-directed plan, timeline and actions to achiev it.
You've got ten months here. Spending 3-4 looking at options, even if you end up following friends to a temporary location in the meantime, will expand your options, not close them off.
Also, everything Isaac Kuo said.
I find myself saying this a lot, but please be aware that MeWe is a closed system. Posts on MeWe can't be bookmarked, shared, or linked to. So whatever you post there is not going to be spread around by the people who see it, except possibly on MeWe itself. That will reduce the rate that your social circles and communities expand.
ReplyDeleteEven more concerning is the fact that content on MeWe is invisible to outside search engines. Post something great on a topic? Google will never be able to tell anyone about it. It won't ever come up in Google's search results.
I don't know about you, but I've had a lot of old posts on various services that have been discovered by somebody who was searching for the topic, and then shared it with their friends or a group. So again, this greatly reduces the chances of your work being seen by non-MeWe users - which is to say, most of the online world.
I've been trying to get MeWe to say if they will be doing anything about these issues, but so far they haven't answered. The most I've heard is that they will be adding public posts in December. But it turns out that those posts will be "public" only within MeWe itself. So it's still a walled garden - or a digital ghetto.
I hate to see so many G+ers jumping straight into digital oblivion!
Peter Maranci
ReplyDelete>I hate to see so many G+ers jumping straight into digital oblivion!
Me, too. There appears to be a rush on to see who can leave Google+ first. Caution is advised.
Jeff Diver When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary to not make a decision.
ReplyDeletePeter Maranci good I don't want my posts to be shared or linked to outside my choice of social media.
ReplyDeleteGood I don't want my posts to be searchable outside my choice of social media.
I want a walled garden with the only people reading my posts being the ones I want listening.
I guess we use g+ differently and therefore your negatives sound like blissful positives.
Thank you for selling MeWe to me.
Rachel Winsor The other options give you the choice to limit your posts to just who you chose. For example, on Hubzilla the addons to interoperate with other services aren't even enabled by default. Due to the nature of Hubzilla, the main project's pod doesn't even allow those addons to be activated. (You can chose to migrate to another pod later if you wish to.)
ReplyDeleteThe point is - you get the choice. Your followers/followees get to have a choice. You don't have to drag everyone else you want to be contacts with to your service. It's not a Facebook wannabe which wants to try and force others to join up.
Rachel Winsor I'd like the option myself. Not all things are for all eyes. But some are, or should have that option.
ReplyDeleteDoes MeWe offer an export function already?
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter There is a "Download your content" option, but it's pretty limited:
ReplyDelete[x] Text Posts
[x] Photos
[x] Videos
[x] Documents
[x] Sound Clips
Notably, it does not even include your contact list, and it does not offer any ability to download Groups, which is significant since most content is in the Groups.
Basically, I think the export function only exists to fool people into using MeWe as their "cloud" storage solution. They're doing whatever they can to lock people in during this early phase (before the VCs funding them demand they extract extreme amounts of value from the "customers").
Isaac Kuo That would explain why their CEO has been making a full-court press to get as many Google Plus people as he can into MeWe. And why he has only given deceptive answers about public posting, and has refused to answer at all about search engine access to MeWe content. I suspected that something like that was going on!
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo I've never read so much propaganda in one post before SMH. The whole premise of MeWe is not collecting or selling user data
ReplyDeletePeter Maranci the YouTube interview and many posts make it entirely clear all the answers to your questions, but maybe you don't want to listen.
ReplyDeleteEven if you trust the founding CEO (I don't), it's a corporation and the VCs holding the shares can replace the CEO on a dime. It's foolish to "trust" any startup corporation.
ReplyDeleteWell established corporations are different - they already have an established and working business model, and you can determine how trustworthy they are based on past behavior.
But a startup will inevitably go through a transition period when it either goes from floating on VC cash to bust or it goes from floating on VC cash to radically altering their business model. Since most startups fail, that altered business model had better involve extracting a lot of value from the locked in "customer" base.
Google+ was a little different in this regard, because it had been kept afloat by Google's immensely deep coffers. And Google had a wide variety of possible avenues to somehow convert the data gathered from G+ into profitable directions.
For an upstart like MeWe, the options for extracting value are more limited...and more Facebook-like...
Isaac Kuo one thing of interest that came out last week, Google never monetised or used any of the user data from Google+.
ReplyDeleteMark Stronge Yes, and this was only possible for so long because they had huge coffers. The intent from the start was to gather the sort of data Facebook and Twitter had, because this was a huge source of data that they did not have access to.
ReplyDeleteThey never did figure out how to do something with this data which they couldn't already do better with their own search data. This left Google+ without its original raison d'etre.
But that's fundamentally what they were going for. It wasn't so much that they wanted a Facebook killer. They just wanted a database of data on par with Facebook's.
Mark Stronge I've watched the video and read as many of his posts as I could find. I've found nothing about sharing posts outside of MeWe or allowing outside search engines to index and directly link to individual posts there. But maybe you don't want to believe that.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is simple: point me to a link. If I'm wrong, you can easily prove it. And I'll admit that I'm wrong, if the link backs you up.
Really? Because that's been covered. You can't share posts outside MeWe, search engines can't index anything. When the "public" posts feature is added, the above still applies but you will be able to see public posts from within MeWe from people that aren't in your contacts, and resharing posts will bring proper credit to the author. Too late here for me to look
ReplyDeleteJuha Lindfors Google may find they care....in a few months when they discover the Google brand has been tarnished by Google's foolish brass. People at the top should be fired for failing to plan an exit strategy. Their actions demonstrate that they are scrambling to figure out what to do after-the-fact.
ReplyDeleteFools at the top had been considering this option for years. Did they have a plan for implementing their decision? Apparently not. Just give the users time to get used to it and see what transpires.
The timing of the decision to ditch G+ was a surprise to many front line G+ staff (whose awkward prolonged silence has been just one symptom of quite obviously floundering around in public without adequate preparation or guidance). Users and Google staff alike got the Late Access treatment!
We have a legitimate beef, not with Google staff, but with Google management. This sloppy decision is their excrement and it stinks!
Mark Stronge Google never monetised or used any of the user data from Google+.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say they didn't try.
(One Googler contact who mentioned the failure to me said they'd tried to use G+ data for AI training, but the data were worthless. Hearsay, rate accordingly.)
Isaac Kuo Thanks so much for your analysis! G+ was such a great environment in which to create, I never thought of it as a silo. Perhaps it was Google's search engine that made the Google universe seem infinite.
ReplyDeleteIt was dumb of me to think that I was communicating worldwide, but I think a lot of us were communicating with so many "followers" from various countries that we thought we had all the audience we ever could handle.
By the way, one of the G+ features I will miss is easy translations of posts like this one. Have you seen another social network with a translate button for every post? Due to their presence on G+ I now communicate fairly easily through language barriers.
Jeff Diver I hate to say it, but Facebook offers built-in translation, both manual and auto. Of course that is provided by Bing rather than Google.
ReplyDelete