On Social Media

And you can find me, after today (it's the 31st here in Australia) via the links at https://wheretofind.me/@LauraEss . It's been fun, and I'm glad this community has existed, because it's meant the difference a pnic, and an ordered escape. :D Originally shared by Laura Ess And...

[Image & File Storage Features] As I get closer to the end of G+'s run, I'm more concerned about image storage in relation the posts I make. I do art, and I also work in virtual worlds (like Open Simulator) and in both cases I want to make posts that show images (and to a lesser extent videos) of both. Now using G+ has spoilt me in that regard, in that it was easy just to upload a copy of an image directly to the post, and there was no extra cost for storing that. This was important to me because I'm on a fixed income , and paying a subscription fee for storage is something I have to consider carefully (one reason I don't use Adobe's Cloud apps). It was possible to copy the URL of the images on G+ to share elsewhere. Google Photo complicated things in that after it was split from G+ ,if you uploaded more than one image you couldn't add individual descriptions for each. It was possible to do that in GPhoto, but that was only useful when you were in GPhoto,,...

So, I like the ability use BBCode on Friendica but it's a pain to type it in manually. And, I looked for a Firefox addon for that, and found EDIT. It adds an extra sidebar (toggled by CTRL+SHIFT+Y) from which you can BB format selections and do more. Nifty. #Friendica https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit/

What you need to know. G+ is is shutting in APRIL now. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/google-accelerates-plus-closure-after-another-privacy-lapse/

[SHARING TEST RESULTS] Here's my results (in screenshots and comments) of seeing how well I can share posts from other platforms I'm looking at as replacements for G+, in the following order: G+ -> Facebook (the control share to show how G+ shares elsewhere): Facebook -> G+ MeWe -> G+ Pluspora - > G+ Frendica -> G+ MINDS -> G+ These the are the ones I'm looking at. In each case I'm attempting to share a post with this image on the originating platform: [PLEASE WAIT UNTIL I"M FINISHED BEFORE COMMENTING]

[MAGE AND VIDEO STORAGE CONSIDERATIONS] One of the advantages of using G+ and Facebook has been that I can upload directly images and videos from my own PC, and not worry about separate storage for either. Otherwise, showing an already online image or video in a post requires dumping a URL to an existing image or video. In G+ you use the same button that you'd use to link to an online web page and Facebook has its own buttons for that. In a comment you just type the URL and wait until a preview appears underneath your text. So that's convenient, more so on G+ because most times you can scroll thru to an appropriate preview image to use in the post. Better than Facebook where sometimes you get stuck blank shim or really inappropriate image for an advert or link to another article. For me, that convenience got a lot less when Photos* (or whatever it's called) got split from G+ . Before that you could post a string of images and add descriptions for each, and people could co...

[COLLECTIONS to HASHTAGS?] I've been trying to find an equivalent of G+ Collections . None of the other platforms have anything like it exactly (though I've suggested an equivalent on the Diaspora development forums as a "Digest" feature). It maybe that my answer is not the same functionality, but careful use of hashtags. For example, if everything I post has a #LauraEss tag, regardless of where it's posted, I should be able to find all my posts by searching for that tag. Likewise if I'm posting to a particular topic, perhaps I can use a "personal prefix" (or suffix to the tag. For example, if my prefix is #LAS (the "A" in the middle of LAS stands for my middle name) then perhaps the topics of Technology, Opensimulator and Random would then be #LASTechnology, #LASOpensimulator and #LASRandom, or maybe #TechnologyLAS, #OpensimulatorLAS and #RandomLAS. I'm not sure whether a prefix or suffix is better or easier to use. There might b...

Here's a suggestion: Dreamwidth. I moved to this after being on LIVE JOURNAL for years. It's old tech - probably just better than MySpace - but it works. https://www.dreamwidth.org/