I would consider myself a "work in progress" when it comes to digital minimalism. I've kept up with this community for a bit now and I see some just all over the map. Could we possibly take the sun setting of G+ as a sign to strip away some of the excess in our lives? Maybe delete some other platforms as well? I just see so many smaller platforms that just don't seem to have potential regarding longevity or even sincerity. Is it time for blogging to make a comeback? Forums?
I for one am trying to cut through the weeds and only keep what's essential for my purposes. What are some that you've deleted or are considering deleting amid this crowded digital space?
I for one am trying to cut through the weeds and only keep what's essential for my purposes. What are some that you've deleted or are considering deleting amid this crowded digital space?
I like the way you think, Brad Borland. I'm leaning towards completely walking away from a large social media presence entirely. I have enjoyed Google+ tremendously, but I will probably switch to a quiet, little blog that I'll update occasionally when I feel the whim. (Truth be told, I've already been headed in that direction because I cut back on the number of posts I write quite a while ago.)
ReplyDeleteJohn Skeats I hear ya! I too have enjoyed G+. I'll miss the simplicity, lack of add, and the clean uncluttered look. I really don't think a social presence is all that necessary. Everyone I ever looked up to or admired wasn't because of social. I also have a blog and a pretty devout audience. At least I own that real estate.
ReplyDeleteCindy Voorhees Yes. Simplicity at its best. A small part of me is hoping they evolve G+ into something.
ReplyDeleteBrad Borland If having 800,000+ followers on Google+ counts as fame, then I've far exceeded Andy Warhol's prediction of having 15 minutes of fame. It's time to recede into the background.
ReplyDeleteI've been more active on here since the shutdown was announced, than I've been for the past years.
ReplyDeleteFor the past years I've had almost no online social media presence, apart from reading and occasionally commenting on posts here on G+.
I've been more and more missing a way to express my thoughts as a result though. For some reason though, the barrier to create a post here on G+ feels lower than to create a blog post. Perhaps because it feels like a social media post requires less of a polish than a blog post. For blog posts it personally feels like I need to spend a longer time on it so it has more of a structure, perhaps more thorough research, and more polish wrt spelling, grammar and formatting. Perhaps more so because it's in my own domain.
John Skeats wow! You do indeed have quite a few followers. I understand how G+ shutting down could be frustrating for you.
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter Yes definitely! But that blog post might mean more since you have to put more into it.
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter and I too have been more active in the past year.
ReplyDeleteBrad Borland I'm actually not all that frustrated by it. I looked at the number of followers in the spirit of Andy Warhol's comment about fame from the beginning. It was fun watching my follower count grow, but I realized all along that it didn't really mean anything. I just look at it as having been fun while it lasted. Now all move on to something else.
ReplyDeleteI follow a lot of people on G+. It was nice to be able to have them together on one site. But with the closure, a growing number of them are (talking about) moving to their own blog, and just sending links over twitter/instagram/etc. But I really don’t feel like following a lot of blogs, or trying to keep track of them over one of those services.
ReplyDeleteJohn Victor being able to create a good summary will probably be key when sharing to other 'social' silos.
ReplyDeleteA summary that conveys enough information to allow for discussion on the silos, while also enticing people to read more details in the full article if they're interested. All while not being click-baity.
It's back to usenet for me.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that g+ was the only 'SM' thing I use. Felt comfortable. Now with some of the posts regarding data scraping from here I am reminded why I never felt at ease with other places. Back to ultra low profile, so do thank you Alphabet for the reminder =^^= Going to miss the cat pix though.
ReplyDeleteJohn Victor I follow blogs via RSS on Feedly. I can curate my stream to what I want to see.
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter one of the differences is you know who your audience is with social media - you have a sense of who's following you and who might comment. With a blog it's like tossing your thoughts into the ocean, and a need to create something for general consumption rather than a known audience.
ReplyDeleteDiana Studer I wish more would go back to rss...
ReplyDeleteJames Lamb some social is like that too. Twitter, for example, can be a bit of an ocean.
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter , Diana Studer I run a blog but find it more and more difficult to grow and keep my email list. Even though my list is the most direct route to them, it seems more daunting these days. I do agree that social makes it easy to keep people and create posts, etc.
ReplyDeleteDo many out there still use rss? Are blog newletters going the way of the dodo?
Brad Borland First time I've even heard of a blog news letter. ;)
ReplyDeleteI used to use RSS a lot, but at some point I stopped completely because it felt like an information overload. I was following too many feeds, and felt like I had to read them all every day...
Filip H.F. Slagter I meant that I use mailchimp for my blog.
ReplyDeleteJames Lamb Unless you are posting to a particular limited audience, public posts wherever are, public.
ReplyDeleteMy blog posts are public, I write what I would feel comfortable with 'anyone' reading.
I am much more comfortable with what I share to blog readers, than the posts I put on G+ which take a couple of steps back.
An early blog lesson was to write to 'anyone' and not to be blinkered by writing to comments from people who are virtual friends going back years!
Filip H.F. Slagter Feedly is good since you can make folders. To skim the 'too many posts' To read first for the chosen few. And I have G+ guinea pigs to thank for pointing me to Feedly when Google Reader died. It is a good, actually better, replacement. And still actively updated. With a paid version as well.
I offer an option to subscribe via email, because some readers asked for that. Zero interest in reading a weekly email from any blog, and I don't send out a newsletter either. That feels like a captive audience for targeted marketing.
feedly.com - Feedly: organize, read and share what matters to you.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I have an old Feedly account from when GReader got canned. I'll prob eventually get back to using it again. :)
ReplyDeleteFor now though, G+ notifications and Mastodon notifications are enough to keep me busy ;)
I'm like John Skeats and others... None of them making sense anymore. I've already deleted a LOT and only using Twitter / Instagram combo actively and even those two fees pointless most of the time.
ReplyDeleteWhen I feel happy I don't feel the need to share it with strangers, when I feel sad why should I share it with strangers and make them say "I'm glad its him and not me" inside.
I only share my photography and illustration works but Twitter turned into a politics and filthy celeb gossip machine and Instagram turned into a lifestyle app. I don't have time & patience to post flickr, tumblr, linkedin, viewbug, ello, reddit etc. because I've deleted my accounts from there years ago already and I have no intention or any boosting enthusiasm to reboot using any of them.
I've never thought though the G+ playing that much big part in my life even though I've never ever been any popular in here (hardly gained 900+ followers) but it was making to post Blogspot meaningful and was allowing me to share my stock photography work easily and helps me a lot on promoting because it was SEO friendly than others.
After all that why should I bother with anywhere else?
I'm sort of hoping I'll hit the 2000 followers here on G+ before it goes down 😂
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter dude, that so needs to happen!
ReplyDeleteI will say that I'll miss G+ as many will. It's so not FB. And it's the only place I've felt comfortable in certain communities like this one.
ReplyDeleteIt fit well into my digital minimalistic mindset.
G+ has been a catalyst that brought together such a disparate unlikely group of people. (Silver surfer garden blogger from WAY down south, next stop Antarctica. Previously a university librarian)
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter followed!
ReplyDeleteI'll miss G+. Maybe it's a business failure, but a success in my book. The dev team refined the app and web UX into something effortless, almost soothing. It has variety of communities and a manageable amount of content. Trolls abounded but never got out of hand.
ReplyDeleteKerem Go have you looked into micro.blog? They seem pretty simple without too much fanfare.
ReplyDeleteBut I must say that many in this community are stressing out over minutiae. No matter the platform, they'll all try to take advantage of the user eventually.
I wonder why more aren't just quitting altogether. I remember life before social.
Brad Borland I do feel like I met a much less diversity of people before social media though. Especially Google+ has made it easier to get to know different kinds of people and be exposed to a wide variety of topics I didn't know interested me.
ReplyDeleteTopics like the #nymwars also made me realise that for instance mononyms aren't just for celebrities, and that a name can be a very personal thing rather than just something your parents picked for you. It also introduced me to concepts like wallet name and meatspace names.
I landed on G+ at the height of the nymwars.
ReplyDeleteThe first wave of Where have all the good people gone? Like Technogran who was battling nymwars, cancer and finding a sheltered home for her daughter. Versus the trite make them use real names - problem solved - NOT! When Yonatan Zunger was visibly against blaming the victim.
For myself, remember Authorship? That pushed me uncomfortably into real name, real face - instead of Diana of Elephant's Eye.
Diana Studer I remember Technogran too. It's been a long time ago, so I'm not sure I actually read it at the time, but I'm sorry to read she lost the battle against cancer :(
ReplyDeletePeter Lemken Is Usenet still active? Once Google took it over, I had the impression it faded into the sunset. And, certainly, the -- er -- off-color Usenet groups are long gone.
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter I got that feeling from the early days of AOL, when it was an "enclosed community" of sorts, and from LISTSERV mailing lists on particular topics. I chatted with people via either IMs or e-mail, and would sometimes meet other music lovers in person when I traveled for work.
ReplyDeleteI'm still a member of a LISTSERV about Mahler's music, though I doubt any of us is under fifty at this point.
Steve Vasta I dabbled a little bit with BBS on the MSX2 homecomputer, but that was just to fellow Dutchies. I did get to meet some international folk through the MSX user meetings and fairs, though its primary audience was also Dutch folk.
ReplyDeleteMy first online international communities were probably through IRC, and a real-time chat connected through an e-mail service (I think it was called Outgun? which offered a whopping 10MB storage!).
Though most importantly the Renderosity.com art forums (specifically Paint Shop Pro), and the XMBForum.com software to which I contributed some code and support, as well as my own MSX forum I ran on the same software.
Steve Vasta Usenet is still active, some groups more so than others. But in priciple it's still a fabulous idea to have a distributed system organized according to interests and not connection between people. The connection will come by themselves. One of the really active groups is still rec.music.classical.recordings and there hasn't been anything like that on any social media platform.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of returning to Usenet after 25 years has real nostalgic appeal. I see there are open feeds maintained by http://www.eternal-september.org/ (requires registration) and http://news.aioe.org (anonymous). I suspect I'd miss inline images and other innovations of the past two decades (not to mention the presence of people under age 45). And if I fell in love with it again, I'd feel compelled to peer and run my own news server... I wonder how much traffic the big eight hierarchies actually generate these days.
ReplyDeleteRelated to the Usenet/Newsgroups discussion:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/8yvl6y/still_a_good_source_of_news_discussion_is_there/
reddit.com - r/usenet - Still a good source of news & discussion? Is there still text -not binary- data?
Brad Borland I have navigated the ocean of Twitter by being very focused and disciplined there. I use it only to promote one of my blogs, which is about apples. Period.
ReplyDeleteThat is a kind of "digital paring back": being selective about how to use these networks
Have met some great folks there that way, grown my readership, & gotten good material for blog posts too.
BTW Blogger makes a great, and underrated, platform for hosting your multimedia content. Not a social layer like G+ though!
Adam Auster I'm glad you mentioned that. I use Twitter but am very careful about how I curate the feed. My rule us to follow 20 or under others and only those who provide high value. No politics, rants, or controversial stuff. I too mainly just promote my blog there, not much else. Also, Twitter as opposed to FB, enables one-way follow. Much more control.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the simplicity mindset you bring. As a blogger myself I'm currently in the process of subtraction. I'm trying to focus more on content than social and only focusing on a select few channels.
I agree about blogger. It's integrated with SEO and is pretty much plug and play. If you don't mind what is your site address? I like to see what others are up to...
Brad Borland Very kind of you to ask about my blogs. My apple blog, originally a professional development project and now just fun, is here:
ReplyDeletehttps://adamapples.blogspot.com/
I also have a blog about Blogger. In a recent post I call for a G+-to-Blogger transition tool (among other things):
https://too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com/2018/12/my-blogger-wish-list-for-2019.html
Blogger has some wonderful new responsive themes that I do not use for legacy reasons too tedious to explain. So am not a good showcase for the latest technology.
I also have blogs on WordPress.com and WordPress.org, so I consider myself a well-round blogging chap.
Adam Auster thanks, I'll check them out. Glad to hear that blogging is still strong.
ReplyDeleteBrad Borland as much as I loathe Facebook, I gotta admit that a while back they did add one-way follows as as alternative to mutual friend requests: https://m.facebook.com/help/276458109035418
ReplyDeleteThough I believe you can disable people from following your profile.
Filip H.F. Slagter yeah, now that I think about it I do recall the follow option... but it's still FB. If it wasn't for my blog I doubt I would even be on any social.
ReplyDeleteStepping back, I don't know why everyone here is so stressed about finding a new home. Life's too short...
Peter Lemken Good to know. Before Google took over Usenet, I used to visit, and occasionally post to, the group you cited. In the late days of dial-up, however, AOL disabled direct access to Newsgroups through its software, at which point, I kind-of-gave-up. I should probably give them another go.
ReplyDeleteBrad Borland I suspect that you, like me, haven't made such strong personal connections through G+ as have others. (Certainly, I miss virtual-chatting with my old AOL contacts. They're probably on F******k, but I'm not going there.) Others have used G+ as a repository for photos and such, and they're looking for ways to transfer the stored collections.
It'll probably be an old-fashioned blog plus Usenet for me.
Well, looks as though G+ shutdown got moved up. Another reinforcement regarding owning your real estate.
ReplyDeleteI hear more and more looking into Blogger. Thoughts?
Brad Borland I am a huge fan. But obviously Blogger does not have all the social stuff you'd like to have.
ReplyDeleteI think for a lot of people the strategy will revert to (1) find a home for your content, and (2) use social media of choice to promote it & reach out to others.
Blogger is a good candidate for (1).
Unfortunately Blogger is another Google entity... The way the big G is handling the G+ shutdown is not making me want to put my eggs in another Google basket again...
ReplyDeleteI was going to say -- one of the reasons I've been favoring Wordpress is precisely that Google owns Blogger, and, in the past, has been somewhat high-handed in exercising its version of censorship over the site. Why do those of you who favor it do so?
ReplyDeleteAs an example of the 'high-handed' censorship that Steve Vasta mentioned: Google at one point was going to ban adult content from Blogger, and reverted its ban after public outcry: https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/27/8119553/blogger-adult-content-ban-reversed
ReplyDeleteSteve Vasta Well WordPress is pretty good too! (I have blogs on both.)
ReplyDeleteI think some of Blogger's strengths are (1) turnkey system (2) free (with no ads unless you want 'em) (3) great server uptime (4) unlimited free image storage.
Not everyone wants to futz with a server, or can.
My comparison:
too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com - Blogger versus WordPress
Adam Auster I use WP.org so I own all my stuff. I just use social to promote. No worries of some platform shutting down. However I do think blogger is fine for casual blogging.
ReplyDeleteBrad Borland That is the popular way to think about Blogger. But I know of some businesses who would smile at that distinction.
ReplyDeleteI've used Blogger to do websites for political campaigns.
OTOH I would never consider Blogger as an alternative for the WP.org website I manage for my employer. Though the whole Gutenberg thing makes me nervous.
Brad Borland There's a very high probability that I will switch to primarily using a Blogger blog I created a few years ago but never started using actively. (I shared only one post publicly.) Blogger doesn't have the either of the attributes that one sees at least one of in every product Google shuts down, so I am not concerned at all about it going away.
ReplyDeleteThe first of those attributes is a large user base. The second is a complete lack of significant enhancements over an extended period (generally measured in years). Google+ is an example of a product with the first attribute. While the number of active Google+ users might seem large to most individuals, it is/was extremely small relative to products like Search, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Docs (and related offerings), and so on. Reader was an example of a product with the second attribute. Years had passed since there had been any meaningful enhancements to Reader by the time Google pulled the plug on it.
Note that I don't put the recent discussions about the eventual demise of Google Hangouts in the same class as shutdowns of Google+ and Google Reader because the Product Manager said explicitly that Google would migrate all Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet before they would pull the plug on the original Hangouts product. That therefore is a simply evolution rather than killing a product. The only difference between that and the transitions of earlier versions of Google+ and Gmail to major new replacements bearing the same name is the name change. Both scenarios involve migrating to what are effectively replacement products.
John Skeats Blogger development did seem to take a hit during the G+ era, but there have been several meaningful improvements in the past 2 years.
ReplyDeleteAnd, btw, a scaled-down version of Reader still exists--in Blogger!
Adam Auster Your point about Blogger development is important. It is the recent history of enhancements that we need to look at. Basing decisions on might have happened two or more years ago is trying to predict what will happen to today's civilizations based on what happened 2000+ years ago and completely ignoring what happened in the last 200 years.
ReplyDeleteWhile there might be a scaled-down version of Reader in Blogger, Google didn't offer a migration path to it from Reader when they shut down Reader, so I still consider Reader to be a termination. It's good to know there's something there. I'll have to look at that a bit more closely.
Meanwhile several help links on Blogger, especially those related to G+, are still dead links, even though they've been reported over a month ago.
ReplyDeleteHow hard is it to update your documentation, especially when broken links are reported by your users? Especially for a company that has they own crawlers that can report dead links. Even if you don't update the documentation documents (as that likely would be pointless with G+ going away), it would still be an improvement to at least remove the dead links.
They might've finally added support for https on custom domains, but to me it doesn't feel like development of Blogger is high on the priority list atm. It rather feels like the backburner that G+ had been on the past couple of years.
John Skeats Of course the Reader termination was a Reader Termination--did not mean to take issue with that! (And a particularly brutal example too.)
ReplyDeleteMy comment about that was just a reflection of how Blogger has been around so long it can be like a dark closet filled with surprising old stuff, that's all.
The Blogger Reading List is functional, though, and very handy, for what it is. You can add any feed to it.
Filip H.F. Slagter They should fix https on custom asap!
ReplyDeleteBut if Blogger and G+ are in the same place now (debatable), they are on markedly different trajectories. Blogger is passing G+ on the way up, G+ on the way down (& out).
That's how it looks to me. If the Blogger engineering team is hit by a meteorite all bets are off.
Adam Auster Exactly!
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter I had that problem, too. I didn't learn about RSS or how it worked until about eight years ago, and I subscribed to the feed on just one site (Prague Monitor). But I never felt like reading the articles when they showed up!
ReplyDelete