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posted by
martyb
on Monday January 21 2019, @02:42PM
from the Hard-to-be-social-without-a-network dept.
from the Hard-to-be-social-without-a-network dept.
It's been a long time coming but soon the wishful thinking social media site alternative Google+ is shutting down for good. Or for bad as the case may be for the hundreds of thousands of users who still call Google+ a home and who are severely lacking in options for a place to move to. There's always Facebook, but given the anti-Facebook culture prevalent in the G+ network over the years it won't be an option for many. While communities debate the move, admins of communities size up the prospect of migrating years of data to another platform. Google plans to execute the shutdown in April 2019.
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Apparition on Monday January 21 2019, @03:33PM (6 children)
I know the common thinking was that "Haha, no one uses Google Plus." While mostly true compared to Facebook and/or Twitter, it did have a few hundred thousand die-hard users. For some reason that I will never fathom, back around 2011/2012, most tabletop gamers gave up on blogs and online forums, and moved their conversations over to Google Plus. I think it had something to do with Hangouts, which many tabletop gamers used to run tabletop games online with. Anyhoo, over the years tabletop gaming blogs and online forums mostly withered and died from inattention as more and more tabletop gamers moved to Google Plus.
When Google announced the shutdown of Google Plus three months ago, it fractured the online tabletop gaming community. No one wanted to move to Facebook or Twitter. For whatever reason, going back to online forums was dismissed by most people out of hand. The right of center tabletop gamers mostly migrated to the MeWe social network, while the left of center tabletop gamers mostly migrated to ActivityPub servers like Mastodon, Hubzilla, or Friendica. Lord only knows where the center tabletop gamers migrated to... back to blogs, possibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @04:34PM (3 children)
This is one of the reasons why it was so foolish of all those people to sign up with FB. When FB does horrible things, you have to move entire groups, similarly you're seeing that with G+ where everybody has to move and if they don't move to the same place, you get fracturing.
It's not like back in olden times when there'd be less concentration of users, so individuals could move to other communities if they had to rather than having to re-establish the critical mass needed to have a viable community.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Apparition on Monday January 21 2019, @04:53PM (1 child)
That's why I think it was stupid for people to move off of blogs and online forums and concentrate on Google Plus. It was brought up several times over the years by various people, but even a few years in when it was clear that Google Plus was largely a failure, "Oh, Google will never shut it down, it's not costing them anything to keep it up." They obviously never heard of Google Reader or Google Wave. I also think it was stupid for people to immediately look towards other social media networks when the shutdown announcement came. IMO, we should be going back to blogs and online forums. But for whatever reason, most feel that those are outdated and not mobile friendly enough.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday January 21 2019, @08:23PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:58AM
If only there was federated social networking... [wikipedia.org]
Facebook is for bottom feeders who either choose to remain ignorant or just don't care.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday January 21 2019, @04:59PM
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter!
But seriously, I never knew of online tabletop gaming being managed online despite it being rather obvious. Been out of tabletop gaming for some years in a community (just Mrs. Lawn and I playing Zombiecide and some others once in awhile). I don't have time to engage in it now but will check it out.
+6 informative, thank you!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:00AM
A friend of mine is part of a huge community in Google+
He is now archiving contents and moving it to his old Blogger account. Years worth of stuff.
The community he is part of doesn't know what they will do or where they will go. Not facebook.
Maybe this will give birth to a decent replacement?