So given the accelerated timeline, looks like it's time to make choices.
Where are you going?
Where would you ideally go if it was complete/ready/functional/more popular?
Where is your community going?
And seeing that notifications for posts seem to be broken, and quite frankly, I doubt it'll be fixed, we might be talking to a wall for a while.
Personally, I've been on Twitter and newly introduced to Pluspora and MeWe, so I'll use those. I'm moving a community I run to MeWe, just because of the tools, but ideally I would have loved Disapora as a solution... but it's just not good at all for communities.
I would love to see how Hubzilla turns out, but have yet to try it out.
Where are you going?
Where would you ideally go if it was complete/ready/functional/more popular?
Where is your community going?
And seeing that notifications for posts seem to be broken, and quite frankly, I doubt it'll be fixed, we might be talking to a wall for a while.
Personally, I've been on Twitter and newly introduced to Pluspora and MeWe, so I'll use those. I'm moving a community I run to MeWe, just because of the tools, but ideally I would have loved Disapora as a solution... but it's just not good at all for communities.
I would love to see how Hubzilla turns out, but have yet to try it out.
I feel talked out, but want to say I think it's good that you're asking these questions. I've been writing long comparisons of the two main "alternatives" with one foot in MeWe, one in Pluspora, third one in my mouth. ;) I'm heartened so many "regulars" in our common homeland family here, are packing away valuables, saying goodbyes, making plans, and starting to settle things in to new houses and checking out the neighborhoods. No one place alone = G+ is the bottom line, #1. #2, people's needs & priorities vary, and so do the other new homes. And #3, whether the priority is "presence", followings, community, photo galleries, music-sharing or whatever, I'd add to all the preparation lists to think about if it stopped this very day. Who have you forgotten to leave a forwarding address or way to re-connect somehow else? What souvenirs will be nice for memory's sake, even screenshots of chats or exchanges, or of a collection, etc. Some will "take out" Gbs of everything, maybe even re-construct. But for the casual surfer/user with a main goal and/or main group of friends &/or colleagues - truly, think about the people you'll miss if you don't act now to make plans after the great migration.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning to set up a Hubzilla server and invite all my contacts to create accounts if they wish.
ReplyDeleteI've had my Signalflare post up for months, and am active on the sites it mentions: Diaspora, Reddit, Mastodon, preparing for GitLab, and a residual Ello profile..
ReplyDeletehttps://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/MuoLbpNFZ4m
If you've not yet made a choice, stop asking about ideals and PICK SOMETHING THAT EXISTS, NOW, WORKS, NOW, AND HAS BEEN PROVEN FOR YEARS.
For Communities, email, mailing lists, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and Reddit are probably your top options. They're bulletproof, the first three give admins direct access to membership lists and contacts (Reddit does not), and are all but universally accessible.
Create a blog. That's a beacon for your group that others can find. Make sure it's on a publicly-visible platform. Of the many other problems with MeWe: you're going to not only sink into the gutter, but you're going to disappear into the sewers. Activity on the site is not visible to the rest of the Net, and your group will not be discoverable. For many groups presently on MeWe, that's apparently an advantage. For many groups considering moving there, it really isn't.
For a whole bunch of people, Facebook and Twitter may well be the answer. They're big and ubiquitous, and most of your friends (and frenemies) are there. (Though I've been surprised by how few high-profile Plussers have posted Facebook links, going through the lists I've been compiling.) I despise both platforms, Facebook with a white hot passion, but at least in the interim, they may help provide some social glue. If they can do one bit of good in the world, I won't mind too much.
Think about what a massive pain in the ass all of this has been. The biggest problems have been Google's absolute lack of clarity and openness, let alone credibility, through the process, the lock on data, and the inability to readily exchange both contact information and reach out to others on G+. That's what I'd seen as the fundamental challenge facing us at the beginning, and was why I created my own community here ("Plexodus: The Beginning is Near"), and jumped for the chance to help John Lewis manage this space (and what it's become wasn't what he'd had in mind, though ... well, I guess I should feel a bit guilty as I saw the potential).
But on the other side, there's this: A whole bunch of stuff has more or less fallen together because of some awesome people, luck, hard work, good timing, and willingness to work together. I've built stronger bridges with several people I'd first rubbed the wrong way -- Gideon Rosenblatt and Eli Fennell, who've been active behind the scenes doing good stuff. Di Cleverly who had the most amazing timing in relaunching her Diaspora pod only a few weeks before Google's "sunset" announcement, and then deciding to take on another 10,000 members. Alois Bělaška, better known to most of you as "Friends+Me", who just happened to have spent years working with the Google+ site and was able to put together an amazing data export tool precisely when it was needed, and to back the hell out of it (he's had a rough week, but we seem to be through the worst of the CAPTCHA crisis). Filip H.F. Slagter, Bernhard Suter, Julian Bond, and Michael K Johnson who've been working with both Google Data Takeout and F+MGE archives to create tools and now sites archiving or continuing G+ communities elsewhere. Shelenn Ayres
for diving into and sharing information on Friendica, one of the exceptionally promising open federated platforms. The Google+ Help community, despite some (still occasionally) rough patches, for handling the questions we really don't want to be dealing with, and giving us the best information available (often pitifully little even for them) on what the hell was going on. Christian Buggedei for answering my "We should have a Wiki" musing with "here you go" -- that's where #PlexodusWiki came from. ("Ante frigus erat" means "before it was cool", in Latin, if you're hip.) And Project Darcy.
ReplyDeleteI've learned a hell of a lot more than I'd ever expected (or wanted) to about the world of social media and new developments. Solid, Wikifactory, Narrative, OpenCloud, the Federation and Fediverse, Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, static site generators, GitLab and GitHub site hosting, standards, and more. And not just the new but the old -- a side comment about Project Xanadu revealed that I'd unknowingly known the Australian representative of the project for years, Andrew Pam. And through others, more knowingly, much of the early history of Usenet, email, the WELL, and other early online systems (some of which I can admit to having used).
Which is why I'm optimistic overall: Communities are resilient. This is not my first rodeo, I've interacted with people on G+ whom I've known for years, in cases decades, from other networks (several of whom may be unaware of this). And as my explorations of size-and-scale of G+ and other social networks have revealed, the world is both large and small. There are a lot of people out there. (And there are new ones being made every day.) But if you're interested (as I often, though not always, am) in the epistemic world -- discussion, ideas, technology, society, culture, art, literature, cat memes... -- the world can become small. The cross of talent, dedication, persistence, success, and a certain willingness to be (or risk being) an ass in public is rare, and you'll find that some names do turn up again and again. Others appear and vanish. Some remove themselves (and I've been thinking about the legacy of profiles of those I came to know on G+ who've left not only the network and the world).
But so long as there's interest, some medium for interconnection, and something to talk about (and ... I'm never short of that, it seems), those connections will form and the communities will re-establish. My hope is that this happens within a medium, or media, that is less subject to the misdirection and mismanagement G+ has seen, and that we have more autonomy as individuals over the information that does survive and that which we don't want propagated.
Mind that optimism over the fruits of universal networks has tended to be crushed before, but there may yet be a way to connect, if not all the people of the world, all the time, in all the ways, many of them -- the ones that want to be connected, and who can work together for positive results.
*So go out there. Fire up a blog, reactivate your Twitter. Put up a Diaspora or Friendica pod, join in on one of the many Exodus Communities out there (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Established_G%2B_Exodus_Communities), put up your own SignalFlare. Do what I've been doing: crawl through your Circles and find the people you've most appreciated being in touch with, and get their contact information and add it to a file. Use that to re-establish contact later -- email and RSS feeds, especially.
Keep in touch, ya hear?
#archiveComments #sub
ReplyDelete.....Where's a wish go? Where's a dream go when you wake up and can't remember it? Nowhere
ReplyDeleteI've set up on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram for now, not going to rush into trying to find a replacement for G+ right away. I think once it does shut down, new sites will come and older sites hopefully can resolve issues they may be having at the moment.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius thank you for shouting out to all those amazing people. I've been really admiring the hardwork and efforts of many to maintain the community at large. Respect. And respect to you Edward, you've busted your ass for all of us with your research.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I don't know... I can be reached to an email in the mean time.
ReplyDeleteSure gonna miss this place
Try LifeCloud... you can import all your Google+ communities, posts, and collections using the data importer:
ReplyDeletelifecloud.site - Support Issue - LifeCloud
A couple imported communities/collections:
https://www.lifecloud.site/shared/component/30053?entryId=31405
https://www.lifecloud.site/folder/41932
Anything which is not dependent on a single company is welcome.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius - Brilliant & parsimonious. I join in thanking you for your chops (busted and unbusted). And by jove, I think you nailed it! (And almost sound like me & some of my colleagues keen on "mindfulness"!) It's time to take actions, to alert others, make plans to find and be found, take what you can before the floods arrive, and get a good sense of "what's out there"- now. For which this has been a great resource, along with ripples & mirrors "here" & in the New World.
ReplyDeleteI already see you "on the other side", and others too (some with different names or icons). We've at least had time to prep, to be challenged and adapt, and explore options ahead while tending to the shop-closing in the here & now. You know my ax of "perspective" and my life involves recognizing how different people want and need different things, but for all of us, better having eyes and minds open. We will survive. Chin chin.
I'm enjoying Diaspora, although I may setup my own Hubzilla instance as I can still connect with everyone on Diaspora.
ReplyDeleteI'll be here when they turn off the lights, refreshing blocked pages.
ReplyDeleteUntil then, and since I'm started this group, I've held my cards to my vest as to where I'm going because I don't want people doing what I'm doing under some delusional concept that I'm competent at picking for them.
I'm only competent at telling you where not to go and picking for myself.
Cheers.
i tried Minds.com., its just a smokescreen for the next tyrannical Facebook, for few assholes to become Billionaires.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm quite happy on Dreamwidth (see https://www.dreamwidth.org/). Dreamwidth has an overall counter-culture subculture, and, as a matter of basic policy, does not censor any posts that do not violate its Terms of Service, regardless of what its payment processors demand. For this reason, it was refused service by PayPay; personally, I consider this a testament to the independent spirit of Dreamwidth; viz. (see https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38065.html):
ReplyDelete> About six months after opening, PayPal -- our payment
> processor at the time -- demanded that we censor
> some of our users' content (mostly involving people
> talking about sex, usually fictionally, in explicit terms)
> that was legal and protected speech but that they felt
> violated their terms for using PayPal.
> We didn't want to restrict 'adult' and/or explicit content,
> so PayPal shut down our account with them. It took us
> a few months to find a payment processor willing to
> take money for us without concern trolling about our
> users' immortal souls or whatever, so we wound up
> burning through a lot of our emergency fund by the
> time we were able to take payments again. To replenish
> the disaster fund, we sold another batch of seed
> accounts. (And then promptly had to reassure our new
> payment processor that no, we weren't going to be
> doing that volume of transactions all the time...)
In a certain sense, I have found Dreamwidth to be the antithesis of Facebook. Under the "Explore" menu, there is a "Latest Things" entry (see https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest), which amounts to its public feed. This feed is updated every minute or two, and displays, under a cloud-style list of tags, a list of the latest public journal entries. Although some of the entries are NSFW, generally speaking, most of the entries tend to include a fair amount of candid discussion about all sorts of topics, ranging from fiction to art to poetry to photography to general writing to politics and even games. Within just a few visits, I was able to find some users with similar interests, and to engage in discussions about hobby-related topics.
(Incidentally, there is also a linked page representing the general mood of Dreamwidth average over the last 1000 posts (see https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest/mood).)
Dreamwidth supports communities, as well as functionality for hiding community membership and community-specific posts from one's main circle. In addition, unlike Google+, it even supports copy-pasting of most formatted text with the formatting intact.
Although Dreamwidth is not suitable for Facebook-style short updates, it is quite suitable for lengthy discussions, especially about any topic related to counter-culture. The overall atmosphere there is very similar to that of an alternative Manhattan publication known as The Village Voice.
Dreamwidth is committed to remaining advertising-free.
Its Guiding Principles are available at the following URL: https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles
Its Terms of Service are stated at the following URL:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/tos
Personally, I have an account on Dreamwidth; if you share similar interests and are interested in following me, let me know.
dreamwidth.org - Dreamwidth Studios