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Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit
by qznc 4y ago
Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise.
Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_have_experience_with_google_or_the/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
- loceng 4y ago"... the indie RPG scene laments its demise." Where did they move?
- noasaservice 4y agoSometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.
- voakbasda 4y agoThis should part of a plan for online organizational continuity. Any community that uses big tech’s services should probably have one.
- remram 4y agoThis is different because mastodon.technology will keep operating until December 1st. This leaves them plenty of time to organize a move by discussing it on the platform like they always have. They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.
- dredmorbius 4y agoOne of the huge problems with on-platform discussions is ... that the discussion itself dies with the platform, and any decisions or announcements disappear with it. At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans. My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.
- remram 4y agoAs I said, mastodon.technology announced shutdown in advance, they haven't yet shut down. So people can discuss future plans there, they don't have to move to do it. I agree it is difficult in the situation you describe, which is not mastodon.technology's situation.
- dredmorbius 4y agoHaving gone through this multiple times on both Mastodon and other social networks (Google+), not having a readily-accessible discussion record is a problem. I'd created both a subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus) and wiki (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page) to memorialise at least some of that discussion, as well as the on-platform discussion. That last is of course now unobtainable, though there were over 700 snapshots of the community homepage saved to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, see: <https://web.archive.org/web/20190401071102/https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772 https://web.archive.org/web/20190401071102/https://plus.goog...> Because of the mechanics of both G+ and IAWBM, actually navigating to articles from that archive ... mostly does not work. The G+ community had over 4,000 members (pretty good for late-stage G+). The subreddit ... a hair over 300. People. Will. Not. Go. Off. Platform. Even. If. That. Completely. Fucks. Them. Over. It's a really perverse dynamic.
- insightcheck 4y agoThis is just a guess, but probably various subreddits and Discord servers. It's probably not the same because the platforms are very different, but people will find new platforms even if the conversation changes due to different forum/messaging UI designs.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago"and Discord servers" vomits in my mouth a bit
- insightcheck 4y agoCould be more different. In less tech-focused communities, the migration that follows a forum closure goes to Facebook groups instead of subreddits, and Slack channels instead of Discord.
- pwinnski 4y agoMostly discord as far as I can see. There's no single place, though.
- tfrutuoso 4y agoGoogle isn't really a good example, they love killing off services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be much more... dramatic, shall we say.
- monocasa 4y agoMySpace and AIM might be better examples then.
- edgyquant 4y agoNo, there are no good examples is the point because we’ve never been here before
- nix23 4y agoOh the youngsters....
- dimitrios1 4y agoNot even. Still a fraction of the userbase and daily activity we are talking about with today's social sites.
- lapcat 4y agoMySpace today still has more active users than Mastodon.
- monocasa 4y agoMySpace deleted all content prior to 2016, making it effectively a new network from the Myspace people normally talk about.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deelowe 4y ago
- jefftk 4y ago> Let’s use Google+ as an example. Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade. Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoBut still plenty popular - at it's peak it had 200 million users. For comparison, that's nearly 2/3 the population of the USA
- thephyber 4y agoThat metric is very misleading. That is the number of Google accounts that didn’t go through the effort of disconnecting from / opting out of Google+. For a few years, all new accounts were automatically enrolled in Google+. It’s likely an extremely inflated number compared to the number of users that engaged with Google+ social features. Citation: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-membership-with-brute-force-signup-process/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-...
- ufmace 4y agoI agree with the sibling that that isn't a representative number. I think we'd want to know something related to actual participation - what's the average daily or weekly number of posts or likes or whatever equivalent is in Plus versus Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- rco8786 4y ago> Google+ as an example It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground. Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI suspect otherwise. One of the challenges of a social network, especially in a declining phase, is that there is far less commercial value being generated at the same time that various sorts of costs, including attacks on the network in both technical and social/economic senses increase. High-value members abandon the network, and those who remain are either stuck (say, because of institutional circumstances elsewhere), or are actively seeking to exploit other members. This means that Trust & Safety costs are constantly increasing at the same time that recruiting talent to serve that role becomes increasingly difficult. What the true cost curve looks like isn't clear, but basing your statement on a constant cost based on present experience is ... probably flawed. This is especially true at Facebook's scale.
- chimeracoder 4y ago> Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it was always niche. It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which grew organically and are both mainstream successes as social networks.
- eitland 4y agoSad sad story. It was the best social network that existed, and before it shut down it had so gotten so much right that I think no others have matched anywhere near the complete feature sets.
- ipaddr 4y agoI remember Google+ and thought it was bad for the average person overall and I'm glad they shut it down for unrelated reasons. Having the biggest social network sucking up personal data to feed the ad network is the reality we are in. Having Google with a larger collection of personal data linking everything to a large social network would have made things worse. Google+ forced real names which made facebook force real names. Google appstore and preinstalled apps you cannot remove force location data. Google obtaining your social graph leads down a dark path.
- eitland 4y agoVery good points. Still, technically, Google+ was far ahead of their competition.
- tanepiper 4y agoI'm still pissed at Google for deleting everything related to a Google+ profile. I had a second gaming profile linked to my main one which also has a YouTube linked to it. Their email about shuttering went into a tab in Gmail and didn't spot it, a suddenly my entire YouTube channel was deleted. Hundreds of hours of work of crafting early videos of Elite: Dangerous and the beauty of its simulated galaxy just gone. Luckily backed up on a NAS but I've never put them back up.
- ByThyGrace 4y agoTIL about .compact on reddit threads. Thanks!
- giantrobot 4y agoWait until you learn about .json and .rss on Reddit threads! IIRC they used to work for subreddits as well but I have not tested either in...forever.
- dredmorbius 4y agoA few of the Reddit RSS features I've found / documented: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_rss_feeds_postpend_rss_to_url/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_...>
- groffee 4y agoThat's crazy. I built an entire scraping engine just to get Reddit posts, I'm pretty sure .rss isn't documented anywhere at all, would have saved me so much work!
- dredmorbius 4y agoHate me later: <https://www.reddit.com/dev/api https://www.reddit.com/dev/api>
- andsoitis 4y agoDidn’t G+ shut down primarily because nobody was using it (failed to compete against other options)?
- Kye 4y agoThey shut it down because PR disasters were adding up due to security breaches from not having enough people paying attention to it.
- dredmorbius 4y agoGoogle's stated reason for shutting down Google+ was on account of security issues. That said, Google's stated communications regarding Google+ had and have been questionable from the start. I'd had my own part in this in addressing the true size of the active community on the site, which was far below the 3--4 billion listed profiles and many hundreds of millions of active users touted. In practice, probably closer to 4--6 million true frequently actives within 30 days or so (itself not unsubstantial), and perhaps 100 million who'd been active at some point. <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq> But I'd take that stated reason with a large dose of salt.
- jrnichols 4y agoI vaguely remember Ello being mentioned as the place to go that wasn't Google+, and I see that they have now pivoted to being an artist social network. kind of interesting.
- dredmorbius 4y agoEllo's had an interesting ride. It began as a venture by a couple of graphic artists, focused on artists. It happened to have (for a few iterations) a quite clean design based on Markdown, and (with a couple of what should have been reasonably small tweaks) could have done well in the long-form text+images space (now largely owned / failed by old-school blogging engines such as Wordpress, Medium, and Substack). The features it had, including Markdown's sections and tables was why I'd posted that particular take on G+ there. It simply presented the information better than any other readily-available platform I was using at the time. In 2015 a bunch of trans activists and sex performers who'd been hounded off Facebook by its Real Names policy wound up on Ello, and a few people arrived from other platforms (I was at the time a refugee from G+). For about six to twelve months it was the New Hawtness, and attempted a few pivots to the space, but performed fairly poorly in doing so. My own Ello profile has a link to a set of curated posts, one section of which details various gripes and failings. One thing Ello did do was organise as a B-Corp with a community focus. That went swimmingly until it didn't, with the first accepting VC money then being sold to a collector of such sites. The B-Corp language seems to have disappeared, along with the community principles texts. What's left is now ... a sort of vaguely art-aggregation site with an interesting history but little future so far as I can tell. It's burned virtually all its early adoptors (myself included).
- madeofpalk 4y agoTwitter and Facebook has users.