On Social Media

Originally shared by Kent Crispin Well, I've been playing around with my blog ( mosqueeto.net ) and got the WP => diaspora and WP => mastodon plugins working -- it's really pretty nifty. I finally got around to opening up the blog for user registrations, and immediately got several from people I never heard of. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that... But while thinking about it, it occurred to me that a wordpress blog would be a fine place for a g+ community to migrate to. WP themes exist that are sort of like g+. There can be lots of registered users, and users can have assigned roles: administrator, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber. These seem like a rough superset of the roles that exist in g+ communities. Free hosting is available at wordpress.com , and there are endless alternatives for paid hosting....

After (re)creating 5 wordpress blogs and one blogger blog, I finally think I have something I can work with. I'm still not sure exactly how I got there, but I think I have a good guess. The first attempt was blogger. "Google+ Exporter" (G+E) (does it still work?) didn't have direct support for wordpress (wp) in its earlier versions, so I did blogger. That worked pretty well, but left all the media (mainly photos) hosted on Google's content distribution network. G+E quickly produced updates that 1) gave a means to save most of the media and 2) export directly in wp format. I ran it again and generated the export files. Then created a wordpress.com free blog and imported my g+ stream. This is at " mosqueeto.wordpress.com ". It's not clear where all the content is being held, but it appears that most of it is still on google's servers. The key may be in the import plugin that loads the export file -- you need to check the box that indicates ...

Originally shared by Kent Crispin The latest update of the "Google+ Exporter" seems to handle the references to images in a much better way. To be precise, previously, I generated a G+ -> blogger backup file, then used the blogger export function to generate another blogger backup, then imported that second backup into a wordpress.com site. This gave me image references like: ...img src=" https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-L38O0UeVzAM/W8xsW9CagsI/AAAAAAABIEU/z08SSCuXFf0DPObMh-kT_RBnOd4UgGN3gCJoC/s400/20181021_185552.jpg "... That is, the image references were still into google's infrastructure. This may be because of the two step process I used (going directly from Google+ Exporter's export to wordpress failed for obscure reasons). However, the latest Google+ Exporter supports direct WordPress export files. I ran it again, and imported the result into a new wordpress blog I'm running locally, and the image references now seem to be "correct...

blogger -> wordpress Recap: I've used the 'Google+ Exporter' tool to export my stuff to blogger backup file format, and imported the result into blogger. The result is at https://c32767.blogspot.com/ . It looks pretty nice, overall. But google's brand has been forever tainted... It turns out that hosted wordpress, at wordpress.com , has a function that will import a blogger backup file, so I thought I would give that a try. I created a free blog at wordpress.com . There was a problem importing the 'Google+ Exporter' file directly (something about there being no author associated with the data). So I generated a backup file for 32767, and tried importing that into wordpress instead. It worked, mostly: https://mosqueeto.wordpress.com/ . The free hosting option at wordpress.com is not the best, I must say, but it is free. I've installed wordpress multiple times in the past, so that is an option. Both wordpress and blogger would require significan...

Exporting to blogger I used the "to blogger format" mode of Google+ Exporter, created a blog, and imported the download. You can check out the results at https://c32767.blogspot.com/ Some comments: I have just over the 800 max limit, so I bought the $20 license. The export for I want to repeat what Edward Morbius has been saying: the time to do this is now. There are learning curves all over the place, and hidden pitfalls and roadblocks abound. https://c32767.blogspot.com/

Here's an example of a hubzilla photo album -- I'm pleasantly surprised at the results: https://nymclub.net/photos/mosqueeto/album/50d4bb8cdc76f81c887b296fdbabc64d6a203552bc8122e7805e6326fb5e7ae0 https://nymclub.net/photos/mosqueeto/album/50d4bb8cdc76f81c887b296fdbabc64d6a203552bc8122e7805e6326fb5e7ae0

How I set up a hubzilla hub on Digital Ocean. Motivation: Hubzilla is the most interesting of the possible G+ alternatives I've looked at so far. It's most important feature, from my perspective, is that your identity isn't tied to a particular hub. Identity portability is built in. You can move your activity to any hubzilla hub -- one you run yourself, or one run by a mega-corp. You can run your own hub and participate fully in the network. But hubzilla is new and perhaps a bit hard to grasp -- new terms, new concepts. I decided to set up a hub. Requirements: Some proficiency in linux system administration at the command line. Financial committment of ~ $100/year. Time committment of ~ 8-24 hours to set up, and then ongoing time TBD. Some expertise in using Google... 0) You need a domain name for your hub (eg: " nymclub.net "). In my case I had registered the name long ago at godaddy.com . 1) Set up a DO account (at https://www.digitalocean.com/ ) and cr...

Patience. I don't understand people immediately leaping to other social media platforms -- g+ isn't slated to close for 10 months, and a lot can happen during that time. Indeed I will be trying as many different platforms as I can in the next few months, but I am certainly not going to commit to anything. Not only will things change, but I will undoubtedly change as well, as I think about what I really want.

Pursuant to adding instant translation to hubzilla/diaspora/etc: the google api charges by the code point character, $20/1000000 characters. Convenient translation, therefore, could be an enhanced service that is charged for at a pretty reasonable rate.

Very useful summary: https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334 https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334

It's hard for me to keep up, so this may have been discussed extensively elsewhere, but...: What kind of an organizational infrastructure is appropriate to support a long term replacement for gplus? For example, I could personally support a diaspora instance with perhaps a few dozen active users, using my personal funds and time. But that doesn't scale. Many of the efforts so far seem to be on an "if we build it they will come and the organizational infrastructure will evolve later" model. Some kind of legal entity (corporation/foundation/trust) with an unlimited potential lifetime and a funding mechanism seems required. A governance mechanism to deal with bad actors, hopefully something other than autocracy, would be nice. In a federated case this consideration applies to each instance individually, and to the overall software base. How do the various alternatives compare in this matter?

Pie in the sky example, hoping to springboard further thought: The technical infrastructure underlying g+ is really pretty awesome, and google is apparently going to keep an "enterprise version", details of which are a bit sketchy to me at this point. But perhaps google would consider a business arrangement where future (non-profit?) entities manage very large instances of the enterprise version, perhaps in a federated manner. The managing entities would need to monetize their service some way, and would provide the moderation service that google has apparently punted on. Again, this is a pie in the sky, but some thought on leveraging the existing g+ technical infrastructure might come up with something creative.

One of the most important features for g+, for me, is the convenient access to instant machine translation. It allows me to follow people from all over the world, and at least have a semblance of understanding what they are saying. This won't be easy to replace.

Google says it will maintain an enterprise version. Would it be possible for various "enterprises" to create a federated version of g+?