Today marks the final two days of G+ as Google says it will pull the plug April 2nd.
What is odd, is that a couple weeks ago, G+ took away the bell icon or notifications, and added a new notifications feature.
A couple days ago, the G+ phone app was updated. Why update it so near the end?
Why not issue the final uninstall command on April 2nd?
I hope I get all the disk space freed up on my cellphone. They better clean it up so I don’t have to root it to do so….
G+ has been great for RPGs and especially the OSR.
The new emphasis on blogs is a good one. There are a few places to find listings of OSR blogs, and many of us have increased the size of our blog rolls.
No single site has arisen to meet the needs of all the various G+ users in the RPG space.
There are many choices:
- Some like Facebook, and an equal number despise it and refuse to use it.
- Reddit has attracted some, and some like me, don’t quite get Reddit’s flow, and are trying to figure it out.
- Twitter has a strong RPG and OSR presence, and those of us who curate and promote a positive circle of people find it a welcoming place.
- MeWe initially attracted a lot of the G+ crowd. I like some of its features. I describe its layout as a cross between G+ and Facebook. Some refuse to have anything to do with MeWe because some people who advocate bad things use it. Unfortunately, the same could be said for any social media site. don’t use technology because bad people use it. Don’t use fire because bad people use it. Just because some misuse a tool doesn’t make the tool bad. I find the MeWe is growing and I get a new group invite every week. I don’t have time to keep up with the groups I follow now, so I’ve been declining those invites. MeWe just recently added the ability to import one’s G+ profile.
- PASHPost is a new option. I just learned of it this past week and set up a page there. It has some features that I and many others liked about G+ but the ability to find and follow users is in need of more work. It is changing rapidly making way for the influx of G+ refugees. Supposedly the ability to import a G+ profile is in the works, but the advice is to download it now, and maybe upload it to PASHPost later.
- Other. There are many other options that I have not had time to explore or not felt drawn to explore, like the fediverse things like Mastodon. I’m sure there are a few more options.
TOOLS
G+ Exporter published their last update today and said, download it all to your PC now while you can. If you haven’t yet started and don’t want to spend $20 on G+ Exporter, go to the Google Takeout option before March 31 to be sure there is time to get your files, as it can take a couple days for the data to be available.
Breadcrumbs
Edward Morbius of the G+ Mass Migration Community also had an effort to migrate the home pages of the top 100,000 G+ communities’ home pages to the Internet Archive. You can see an example here.
Lots of people pinned a post on their G+ and on other sites listing all their other social media. The site wheretofind.me lets users make a list of all the online site where they can be found. You can see an example of mine here and below.
The Last Gasp
Many, including me, are still posting to G+. I said I’d go down with the ship, and I meant it. As long as this effort still gets my efforts to the eyes of others, it’s worth it.
James West’s image that I used for the image for this post says it all. I particularly like his latest post to use this image:
The last initiative has been cast. Actions are simultaneous. The deathblow is dealt… what is your last action?
Final Frustrations
Last weekend I finally finished converting G+ links to Internet Archive links. Unfortunately, several people just deleted their G+ pages before I could get to it. I made a note that the source I linked to is lost to the ages since the page was deleted before it was archived. So many great conversations. The biggest frustration in that was that I had to do all this manually.
I posted a few weeks ago an SQL statement to help identify G+ links in one’s posts, but it did not capture all of them. Even those identified, I had to manually archive on the Internet Archive and then replace the G+ links on my blog with the new Internet Archive links. I hope I found them all. In the end, I had to cycle through all the articles on my blog looking to G+ links. All the backups of each post and auto backups made too many records to automate. I just didn’t have time to decipher which records were the current post.
Moving forward, I will have to make an internet Archive backup of all links on my blog. I also need a plan for archiving all of my blog there, so when I’m gone. If there’s anything anyone finds interesting, perhaps only my descendants will.
My follower count on G+ was moving upward and was on track to hit 600 by the end of 2018, but topped out at 406 in November, 2018 and then dropped down to 398, went up to 402, dropped to 399 and stopped at 401. I too followed a few people on G+ at the end. I wanted to show them support, and some followed me back. I think a sociologist could make a career out of studying G+ for building a community and watching how that community faced the inevitable. Whether there’s a complete record of this for any community, I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it.
Lastly, why G+ couldn’t make a read only archive of G+ as it stands on April 2, 2019 is beyond me. Google who wants all the information they can and who saved a famous internet forum by making a read only archive out of it, won’t do the same for G+. Why they are keeping G+ around for business users and wouldn’t let free users convert to a paid model is beyond me. People who would have paid money to keep their G+ were not given the opportunity.
I’d really like an open and honest explanation from G+ about what went on. I suspect that no one at Google really took ownership of G+ and that they built a social media site without really understanding how it needed to work. At least, that’s the way it looked to us who were using it. Their constant inflating of users in the press to save face made it worse. Why did they keep throwing money at it all these years if it was that bad? You’d think all the smart people and especially the bean counters would point out the folly of the sunk cost thinking that kept it alive.
The users in some segments, hobbies and interests, like the OSR, thrived on G+. Google never understood how to capitalize on that. I doubt any new thing Google has will attract those of us burned by the G+ fiasco. We are now much more discerning of how we use our data.
The Mighty Are Fallen
Surprisingly in the waning weeks and month, some big names showed their backsides too prominently, or their coerced allies finally turned on them. While the ones who showed their nonsense are still out there, many, like myself have blocked and ignored them to keep that drama out of their lives. It was really bad this past Fall and once I blocked them on G+, my feed was nothing but gaming and encouragement.
Unfortunately, some of those jerks made life miserable for the creators of the most well-known OSR logo and it was just a mess. I am saddened by how that whole thing ended.
Then a well known OSR contributor, who was obviously a jerk to many with whom he interacted online, finally has his comeuppance when his true colors were revealed. I don’t think all the fallout from that will ever be known. Whether you agree with the resolution of this that removed him from the realm of future RPG creations, you have to admit, he went down much like he relished in taking down others. The lesson here is don’t be a jerk online and you might have more people mourn your absence or stand up to defend you.
Conclusion
We shouldn’t be surprised if any other social media site with a lot of traction among the RPG/OSR crowd fails. Maintaining control of your online presence, such as through a blog ensures a more long lived online presence.
There has been a mini-renaissance among OSR bloggers, myself included. I’m not posting here as often as I would like, but I aim for about once a week. I’m podcasting three times a week and sharing my episodes, RPG publications, and other things via all my social media, as I always have.
The past two or three years have seen the rise of RPGs as a driving force in our culture, especially via online entertainment from television and movies, to YouTube and Twitch. I’ve been playing D&D over 40 years. D&D is 45 years old since its first publication in 1974, and will continue to be played in its current extant versions for decades to come. I know I will play until I can no longer roll the dice. My plan is to play til I grow old & die many decades hence.
As long as I can manage an online presence, you will find me sharing my stories of games past and ideas for various game situations.
I look forward to interacting with all of you.
In the coming weeks, I hope to introduce my granddaughter to RPGs and make her the third generation in my experience with RPGs. I hope I can show her grandchildren how to play.
