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.
Related Stories
The Internet Archive is working to preserve public Google+ posts before it shuts down
Google is set to begin deleting data from its beleaguered social network, Google+ in April, but before that happens, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say that they are working to preserve public posts on the platform before they vanish forever.
In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won't be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted. They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts, and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content. They also note that they won't be able to capture everything: comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution.
Related: Google+ Shut Down After Data Breach and Cover-Up are Exposed
Senators Demand Answers About Google+ Breach; Project Dragonfly Undermines Google's Neutrality
Google+ Bug Exposes Non-Public Profile Data for 52 Million Users
Death of Google+ Causing Angst
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @03:20PM (7 children)
REAL social interaction doesn't require a computer.
Get your sorry asses out in the real world and talk to people face to face.
If you can't handle that, kill yourself. You will not be missed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @03:27PM
But wouldn't that mean you need to talk to people in person (ie, "face-to-face")?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @03:35PM (2 children)
The real world is vastly overrated.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)
"The real world is vastly overrated."
.
Says the child who doesn't even know where the electric power that runs his computer comes from.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 21 2019, @08:55PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @06:53PM
Why are you so hostile? How are people not being able to talk to other people hurt you in any way?
What's your major malfunction?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 21 2019, @08:57PM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @09:20PM
I know.
(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?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday January 21 2019, @03:34PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) [wikipedia.org]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Monday January 21 2019, @03:36PM (1 child)
Yep. Like I posted above, many moved to Mastodon, Hubzilla, and/or Friendica.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday January 22 2019, @03:23AM
Most of us have moved to Diaspora(Pluspora), or MeWe.
I really like Diaspora conceptually, and what's there works. It really needs a bunch of features added to be a replacement for G+ at even a basic level, but it's a start. MeWe is ... meh. A bit more polished, but not very nice to use. It does have some of the features needed, but the community feel is not (currently) the same. You'd need to have used it for a while, but G+ is a really interesting thing. I've met fantastic people there, and will stay in contact with many regardless of platform.
I always described the vibe as being like walking around at a party, moving from group to group and conversation to conversation. The general intelligence level is higher than Facebook, twitter, etc, but there are fewer people. This is not a bad thing.
I'm really going to miss it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 21 2019, @05:06PM (6 children)
I don't care if it's G+, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else. Long read here about Swedish kids and Televerket, in the '80's. https://medium.com/s/love-hate/how-a-phone-glitch-sparked-a-teenage-riot-eb785c39bd01 [medium.com] To summarize the story, kids discovered how to use the state-run phone system to talk and hang out with each other. No rules, pretty much anything goes. They exploited a glitch in the system, and made friends with each other, and no one was making money off of them.
That is what "social media" is all about. All of these online offerings with their rules and SJW bullshit? Who needs them?
Just provide the connection, then get the hell out of the way. Some subjects may be unpopular, but in a nation of 350 million, there are probably thousands of people who want to discuss that particular subject. Let them find each other, and don't worry about stupid rules. I'm looking primarily at Twitter and Facebook - but there are other guilty parties out there.
That seems to be a good thing about Discord. The admin of any given chat room makes the rules - and if you don't like the rules, you can create your own chat. Tailor the rules to your liking, or just don't make any rules. Discord staff doesn't have much, if anything, to say about what goes in any chat.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @07:38PM (3 children)
BBS's should make a comeback! maybe we can just use ssh instead of telnet to keep it at least a little secure.
getting people to change their ways from emojis and pictures to actual writing might be hard though. but sometimes it requires effort to be social anonymously and without adults/capitalism getting in the way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:02AM
Well, emoji are perfectly fine Unicode (mostly anyway), and you can have both emoji and your BBS. I mean, you don't want US-ASCII only BBS, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:03AM
Move back to IRC?
Build in support for posting images?
Keep an auto history?
What more could you want?
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Tuesday January 22 2019, @08:08PM
As I posted last week, I've seriously been considering starting up a BBS over SSH. I'm just not sure if anyone other than me would use it and therefore worth the money to rent a VPS.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @11:08PM
And there is the connection. It's in the Internet wire we all have in houses. But it is not used as intended. The problem started by going from semi-decentralized network based partially on mutual knowledge (who is who / who can do what) to platform-dependent centralization when nobody knows nobody, and everyone can turn to spambot every moment. This introduced a need for censorship and ended with "censorocracy" in which people who have capability to make up their lives by censorship have more power.
"Social media" is NOT community. This is the main thing which is notoriously ignored.
The main objective of "Social media" is to create division for society. Samsung and Apple. Creators and remixers. Right-wing seeing leftists' plot in all things and left-wing which takes all things as offending. This is the objective. Divided will try to prove the other side and will buy more, and will not do one more thing.
This thing had to be fixed when XIX-century (or even XVIII-century) publishing model started to fall apart in 1990s. Since introduction of the Net there was no blessed publisher with holy decisions, licensing hegemony and protection money. The Internet gave an equal start, with its few megabytes in a shell account for own stuff licensed in own conditions. This started a community boom in 1990s, when everyone had a website. The problem noticed by publishers was that some people shared knowledge there without paying mafia.
A nicely described model: In late 1990s, some professor, (sorry, I don't remember the name but I know it was like "Dick" or "Pecker"?), shown these communities as made of creators ("digitariat"), distributors, compilers and remixers ("cogitariat") and consumers ("proletariat") - with no space used earlier by publishers. Everyone could be all of classes at the same time, depending on their interests, expertise and data processed. Many people devoted time and energy to share knowledge using the new media, on their own terms, which outed these publishers from distribution chain.
So it was needed to "burn" this energy used for creating and distributing using something other. And it is burned in all these "social media" things. This is outside of Internet's objective which is contacting people and sharing ideas, knowledge, information. "Social media" comes down to ad distribution system, made to keep an used absorbed by throwing usually useless information about other people, but with no intellectual gain to the "user" (?still user? or a newly created product?).
Discord misses the historic capability - to know something, you have to ask and ask forever. A nice alternative would be these open source platforms shown a few comments above, but servers are expensive and these platforms have a poor reach - I don't know any people from hobby forums who may have such account.
P.S. If you again try to find a plot here: No, there's no plot. It's an objective of optimization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:58AM
Thanks for the link. That article was awesome.
Reminds me of a BBS we had back in the day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @05:50PM (2 children)
other than search and gmail, is there anything google hasn't orphaned?
(Score: 5, Touché) by Apparition on Monday January 21 2019, @05:58PM
AdSense, Doubleclick, and YouTube.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @10:03AM
the CIA
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday January 21 2019, @10:36PM
Since you can export your data [google.com], are there other online services that you could import it into? Seems like it would be a business opportunity to give these angst-ridden individuals a social media site to at least temporarily land on for their post-breakup rebound.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:41AM
We're going back to mailing lists