5 ms·

G+ was _the_ place to be for one of my hobbies (OSR/DIY D&D). A massive blow. I made jokes about if we hang in there and don't get taken in the Google+ Rapture

by dallas 8y ago

G+ was _the_ place to be for one of my hobbies (OSR/DIY D&D). A massive blow. I made jokes about if we hang in there and don't get taken in the Google+ Rapture, things will go on like normal. Turns out G Suite users get to keep G+ and I'm a GAFYD user since the beginning. Yay for me? Everyone is now displaced. Facebook is universally reviled as an option, Mastodon/Diaspora has attracted a whopping several folks. Some others tried starting forums to no avail. Discord seems to be doing well for many but not a majority. MeWe is the only platform that people seem to "get" but it has a controversy to it. Nevertheless, the blogs still seem to be ticking along.

artificialLimbs 8y ago
Curious to know the MeWe controversy. I just quit Facebook after being 3 day censored for posting a link to a Twitter video that was played on CNN. Joined MeWe to hopefully help build a replacement network.
- Pamar 8y ago
  When I announced (on Google+) that I was moving to MeWe and was, obviously, suggesting everyone to follow me there I got a couple of comments saying that MeWe was some sort of New-Right bastion. To be honest, I have not encountered any of that, but then I have only joined (or created) a very small number of groups and they were all for specific hobbies/interests. Another (possible) problem is mature content and sex bots. The former is easy to solve, you just block or leave users/groups that post mature stuff if this is not your cup of tea. Bots are a bit more annoying but every group has at least a moderator so they are quickly disposed of.
  - dallas 8y ago
    Yes - that's the controversy I'm referring to. I'm on MeWe and haven't encountered any people there that I have followed specifically discussing far-right/alt-right topics except for a couple of folks posting in groups who have made a brand of it (e.g. "The RPG Pundit" and the ex-CEO of Milo Inc. who published an OSR D&D retroclone), but at the time I joined up, all of the political groups in the directory were right-wing or nationalist, and this coinciding with the time Gab was shut down. The sex bot thing has been a problem for a while. I _think_ group owners have been blocking them, and of course I block them, but they still somehow linger to post, and the notifications of their post are not blocked. At least that's how it was about a week ago - seems to have been fixed, or the bots in question have been eradicated.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Yeah, there are Nazis on MeWe. But as far as I know, there are Nazis on every single social network, so that hardly seems like a strike against MeWe. There's a claim that the company specifically targets Nazis to invite them over when they've been banned somewhere else, though, and that makes some people itchy.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    The alt-right, conspiracy, white nationalist, fascist, Nazi, anti-vaxxer, and related content dominate the publicly visible groups under MeWe's topics. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_trip_report/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_tri...
a_lieb 8y ago
Mastodon/Diaspora seems like a pretty good fit for a small and tightly-knit community like Old School Revival D&D. (Granted I had to Google that acronym to find out what it was, so I can't claim to know much about the subculture. :) ) A few other smaller subcultures have gotten a foothold on Mastodon; it's far from a ghost town. Another upshot is that unlike anything else you listed, it's decentralized and federated, so your instance could never be taken down.
- Pamar 8y ago
  The problem I have with Mastodon is exactly the same I am encountering with MeWe: when I tell friends/aquaintances that I am moving to MeWe I get the chat/email equivalent of a groan. Nobody (except a small minority even among techies/geeks/nerds) really want to go through the hassle of joining yet another platform. Does not matter if it is free, has better quality, finer controls, is federated or not, moderated or not. I managed, years ago, to convince a decent number of people to follow me on Google+, but the sad reality that now it's either Facebook (which I never created a profile for) or "don't call us, we'll call you...".
  - est 8y ago
    Do you think allowing people post directly without registration would help? (as long as spam was controlled properly)
    - Pamar 8y ago
      Actually, what I would like to have (currently missing from MeWe), is the ability for people to see what I post as "Public" without needing an account to MeWe. Which was, for me, an important feature of Google: if I wanted to broadcast a link or some content I could publish as public (so everyone on Google+ would see it if they visited my profile or were already linked to me) but I could also send the link to the G+ post via email or chat to people who had no Google account and they would still be able to see it (even if they would not be able to comment without logging first). See what I did in this same thread for a public post that I would like to have available on the Internet Archive... it is just a link and you can read it without needing a G+ account. I proposed it as a per-pay feature to MeWe but so far I only got a canned "thanks for your suggestion" - my main problem is that even what they call "Pages", like the BBC MeWe page is visible only inside the app itself.
xorcist 8y ago
> Some others tried starting forums to no avail. As someone who never really used G+ or FB, why isn't forums working out for them? It seems like the perfect fit for a narrow interest based community. Plus people already know how to use them, as they were around before Social, and it should be a natural thing to return to. Are there discoverability problems?
- dallas 8y ago
  Two-pronged IMO and YMMV: - Lack of a mobile app as nice as the G+ one. Is commonly stated reason why e.g. Diaspora is a no-go and MeWe got traction. - The niche hobby evolved and the interests central to the forums which spawned it are now considered retrograde or orthodox. OK for some.
bad_user 8y ago
> Nevertheless, the blogs still seem to be ticking along. Unless something changes fundamentally about the web, which I doubt, blogs will be here long after current social networks are dead. RSS / Atom too, for as long as there are blogs around, in spite of what some people would like you to believe. And if there's one thing that you can say about the Internet, is that the Internet's stack of technologies is long lasting and the more things change, the more they stay the same. So yeah, if you want to publish content for others, the safest bet is to have your own blog. With RSS and email subscriptions. And your own domain of course.
- mcv 8y ago
  Blogs are much closer to the way the Web should be than social networks are. Have your own space. The only thing is that I would like an easy system that would allow me to follow multiple blogs in a social-network style stream/feed. I hear Hubzilla might do something like that.
  - valker43 8y ago
    So, Medium?
  - tomjen3 8y ago
    I may be missing something obvious here, but isn't that literally what RSS is for? Which is actually how I found this article.
    - mcv 8y ago
      RSS is for following blogs, but not specifically for integrating them into social networks. That's the thing I want.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Blogs, and new-form blogs -- static site generators, high-feature Federated platforms like Friendica and Hubzilla, pervasive RSS (see for example Reddit, which really does well here), etc. -- are all very exciting and promising parts of this period.
mikekchar 8y ago
I'm seriously thinking of going back to usenet. I wonder if anyone is still there...
dredmorbius 8y ago
MeWe's "controversy" is that it's a hive of fascist, white nationalist, rascist, antivaxxer, lunatic conspiracy theory, and other activity, apparently with the full awareness and implicit if not explicit endorsement of the CEO, Mark Weinstein. I've raised this issue with several researchers into online / computational propaganda (one well-known researcher's response began "Holy moly"), and listed advisors of MeWe, who've described the situation as "troubling". See: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_trip_report/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_tri...

by dallas 8y ago

artificialLimbs 8y ago

Curious to know the MeWe controversy. I just quit Facebook after being 3 day censored for posting a link to a Twitter video that was played on CNN. Joined MeWe to hopefully help build a replacement network.

Pamar 8y ago
When I announced (on Google+) that I was moving to MeWe and was, obviously, suggesting everyone to follow me there I got a couple of comments saying that MeWe was some sort of New-Right bastion. To be honest, I have not encountered any of that, but then I have only joined (or created) a very small number of groups and they were all for specific hobbies/interests. Another (possible) problem is mature content and sex bots. The former is easy to solve, you just block or leave users/groups that post mature stuff if this is not your cup of tea. Bots are a bit more annoying but every group has at least a moderator so they are quickly disposed of.
- dallas 8y ago
  Yes - that's the controversy I'm referring to. I'm on MeWe and haven't encountered any people there that I have followed specifically discussing far-right/alt-right topics except for a couple of folks posting in groups who have made a brand of it (e.g. "The RPG Pundit" and the ex-CEO of Milo Inc. who published an OSR D&D retroclone), but at the time I joined up, all of the political groups in the directory were right-wing or nationalist, and this coinciding with the time Gab was shut down. The sex bot thing has been a problem for a while. I _think_ group owners have been blocking them, and of course I block them, but they still somehow linger to post, and the notifications of their post are not blocked. At least that's how it was about a week ago - seems to have been fixed, or the bots in question have been eradicated.
- mcv 8y ago
  Yeah, there are Nazis on MeWe. But as far as I know, there are Nazis on every single social network, so that hardly seems like a strike against MeWe. There's a claim that the company specifically targets Nazis to invite them over when they've been banned somewhere else, though, and that makes some people itchy.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  The alt-right, conspiracy, white nationalist, fascist, Nazi, anti-vaxxer, and related content dominate the publicly visible groups under MeWe's topics. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_trip_report/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_tri...

a_lieb 8y ago

Mastodon/Diaspora seems like a pretty good fit for a small and tightly-knit community like Old School Revival D&D. (Granted I had to Google that acronym to find out what it was, so I can't claim to know much about the subculture. :) ) A few other smaller subcultures have gotten a foothold on Mastodon; it's far from a ghost town. Another upshot is that unlike anything else you listed, it's decentralized and federated, so your instance could never be taken down.

Pamar 8y ago
The problem I have with Mastodon is exactly the same I am encountering with MeWe: when I tell friends/aquaintances that I am moving to MeWe I get the chat/email equivalent of a groan. Nobody (except a small minority even among techies/geeks/nerds) really want to go through the hassle of joining yet another platform. Does not matter if it is free, has better quality, finer controls, is federated or not, moderated or not. I managed, years ago, to convince a decent number of people to follow me on Google+, but the sad reality that now it's either Facebook (which I never created a profile for) or "don't call us, we'll call you...".
- est 8y ago
  Do you think allowing people post directly without registration would help? (as long as spam was controlled properly)
  - Pamar 8y ago
    Actually, what I would like to have (currently missing from MeWe), is the ability for people to see what I post as "Public" without needing an account to MeWe. Which was, for me, an important feature of Google: if I wanted to broadcast a link or some content I could publish as public (so everyone on Google+ would see it if they visited my profile or were already linked to me) but I could also send the link to the G+ post via email or chat to people who had no Google account and they would still be able to see it (even if they would not be able to comment without logging first). See what I did in this same thread for a public post that I would like to have available on the Internet Archive... it is just a link and you can read it without needing a G+ account. I proposed it as a per-pay feature to MeWe but so far I only got a canned "thanks for your suggestion" - my main problem is that even what they call "Pages", like the BBC MeWe page is visible only inside the app itself.

xorcist 8y ago

> Some others tried starting forums to no avail. As someone who never really used G+ or FB, why isn't forums working out for them? It seems like the perfect fit for a narrow interest based community. Plus people already know how to use them, as they were around before Social, and it should be a natural thing to return to. Are there discoverability problems?

dallas 8y ago
Two-pronged IMO and YMMV: - Lack of a mobile app as nice as the G+ one. Is commonly stated reason why e.g. Diaspora is a no-go and MeWe got traction. - The niche hobby evolved and the interests central to the forums which spawned it are now considered retrograde or orthodox. OK for some.

bad_user 8y ago

> Nevertheless, the blogs still seem to be ticking along. Unless something changes fundamentally about the web, which I doubt, blogs will be here long after current social networks are dead. RSS / Atom too, for as long as there are blogs around, in spite of what some people would like you to believe. And if there's one thing that you can say about the Internet, is that the Internet's stack of technologies is long lasting and the more things change, the more they stay the same. So yeah, if you want to publish content for others, the safest bet is to have your own blog. With RSS and email subscriptions. And your own domain of course.

mcv 8y ago
Blogs are much closer to the way the Web should be than social networks are. Have your own space. The only thing is that I would like an easy system that would allow me to follow multiple blogs in a social-network style stream/feed. I hear Hubzilla might do something like that.
- valker43 8y ago
  So, Medium?
- tomjen3 8y ago
  I may be missing something obvious here, but isn't that literally what RSS is for? Which is actually how I found this article.
  - mcv 8y ago
    RSS is for following blogs, but not specifically for integrating them into social networks. That's the thing I want.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Blogs, and new-form blogs -- static site generators, high-feature Federated platforms like Friendica and Hubzilla, pervasive RSS (see for example Reddit, which really does well here), etc. -- are all very exciting and promising parts of this period.

mikekchar 8y ago

I'm seriously thinking of going back to usenet. I wonder if anyone is still there...

dredmorbius 8y ago

MeWe's "controversy" is that it's a hive of fascist, white nationalist, rascist, antivaxxer, lunatic conspiracy theory, and other activity, apparently with the full awareness and implicit if not explicit endorsement of the CEO, Mark Weinstein. I've raised this issue with several researchers into online / computational propaganda (one well-known researcher's response began "Holy moly"), and listed advisors of MeWe, who've described the situation as "troubling". See: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_trip_report/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/a1jqsy/mewe_a_tri...