We're now well into the post-Google+ period, and I'd like to open up the question of how things went.
I've got my own mental list of things which went well or poorly in the process, of the latter, many of which involve myself.
This is open to contributions and discussion.
Discussion here or at PlexodusReddit.
There's a Plexodus Wiki Post Mortem page open as well.
If you're like me, well, first, my deepest sympathies, but you've used F+MGE to capture your posts and other text content, but were saving images for later, only to be caught by the Google+ shutdown.
Turns out that googleusercontent.com is still serving up those images (this may be data that's harder for Google to remove), so you can still fetch media content through Google+ Exporter.
Hop on that now if you're interested.
#GooglePlus #GplusRefugees #Plexodus #DataExport #FriendsPlusMe
"Googleplus2" a/k/a G2 is a project to archive all public G+ community content. This was a "stretch" goal of the Google+ archiving project.
The tracker here shows the full project, there are 81,270 or so work sets of 100 communities, and as of a few moments ago, the project was at 59% complete, with about 6 hours left to run at present rates.
The contents should appear at the Internet Archive in about a month or so, it'll take time to move it all there.
Tracker status below:
https://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus2/
#googleplus #gplusrefugees #plexodus #archiveTeam #internetArchive
If you have Docker installed, the following command will help preserve Google Plus: docker run --publish 127.0.0.1:8001:8001 --restart always archiveteam/warrior-dockerfile
Anybody here work for Amazon within AWS who might be able to talk about data ingress and more significantly, egress.
Regards #Plexodus.
Thanks.
I'm just sitting here watching the smaps go round and round...
The Archive Team Google+ project tracker is smoking.
https://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/
And it's got to go faster.
Grab a Warrior and pitch in if you can!
(Got bandwidth, storage, CPU, and modest l33t ski1z? You can help!)
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior
#GooglePlus #GplusRefugees #Plexodus #ArchiveTeam #InternetArchive #GoogleMinus
https://pastebin.com/raw/0Wh4BJah
This list comes from a set of contributions from +Eli Fennell's listing here:
https://plus.google.com/110619855408549015935/posts/XrZkNKam1Jo
Though not strictly-speaking "signal flares", I've submitted the profiles to the Internet Archive's Wayback machine (scripted via the "Save" URL) -- that part took about 90 seconds. Sorting out grabbing all the profile names and IDs from G+ HTML (and wrestling with local systems) a couple of hours.
A really good reason to pin a #signalflare post is that that pinned post WILL SHOW UP IN THE INTERNET ARCHIVE when saved.
(I'll schedule another save or few of this through April 2.)
This'd be a good set of folks to keep tabs on and through whom to find others.
I'll be adding this to the #PlexodusWiki Notable Names Database (NNDB) ... eventually:
https://social.antefriguserat.de/
https://pastebin.com/raw/0Wh4BJah
#GooglePlus #GplusRefugees #Plexodus #SignalFlare #GplusContacts
A dataset of 103,188 larger and more-recently-active Google+ Communities is now available online, from my Google Drive account:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Pc_QmZE_RsGt2Irvm_BgEbFjRBssUOD9
This may be of interest to those who are seeking to contact active or thriving Google+ communities, to archive them, or to otherwise work with identified active communities.
What is this?
This is a subset of the full 8.1 million Google+ Communities, the vast majority of which have little or no publicly-visible activity or members. The subset does show both an appreciable membership and some degree of recent activity. Not every community in this list is active and healthy, but the ones that are are likely to be found here.
There's additional information, including membership counts, activity levels (visible posts, comments, plus-ones, and reshares), and some derived statistics, plus community titles, which may be useful in identifying communities highly likely to be active.
The file is a gzipped (compressed) textfile with comma-separated values, data fields in the first record. 103,189 records total.
More at #PlexodusReddit....
#GooglePlus #GplusRefugies #Plexodus #PlexodusReddit #SocialMedia #DataAnalyis #rstats
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b06agd/large_and_recentlyactive_google_communities/
I'd posted this to the rapidly-fading PLOOS, though some of the information applies here as well.
I'll be checking the Google+ Notifications page periodically, at least twice a day if possible. That's not as slick as the Notifications pane was, so expect slower responses to anything.
I'm trying to keep on top of the Google+ Mass Migration community, as well as the (much less active) Plexodus: The Beginning is Near community.
I've had a fair bit of personal stuff going on for the past few weeks which is making online time both less available and productive. My apologies.
The Plexodus Subreddit is an excellent place to get ongoing and post-sunset information. That would be on Google+, data migration (focusing much more on data import), contacts, where people are, and yes, yet more discussions about the past and future of social, online, and user-generated media.
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus
There's far too much updating to do at the #PlexodusWiki. So I'll try to tend to that garden as well:
https://social.antefriguserat.de
(It means "before it was cool", in Latin, if you're wondering.)
I'm still working on my future personal blog home. That'll be at GitLab, as a continuation of the Lair of the Id. Plan is to post original longer-form content there, then syndicate it elsewhere -- Mastodon, Diaspora, and the Lair subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius).
The New Lair blog will be: https://gitlab.com/dredmorbius/lair-of-the-id.git
For those of you who were Mirandans (or want to find out what the hell that was), there's still the /r/MKaTH and /r/MKaTS subreddits. I'm open to posting a bit more content there. MKaTH -- Miranda's Knitting and Tea House, is public, MKaTS -- Miranda's Knitting and Tea Society, is a related private forum:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH
For more on what that's about:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/wiki/faq
There's also a more general Plusser's subreddit, /r/PLOOS:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ploos/
Otherwise, I'm posting at Mastodon, Diaspora, Tildes, Reddit, Hacker News, and a few other haunts, generally as "dredmorbius", as promised.
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus
#googleplus #GPlusRefugees #dreddit #plexodus #plexodusReddit #plexodusWiki
It's a static archive through February 26, so far, but this could be really useful for future reference.
This is Google's official G+ shutdown announcement. Text in full:
Shutting down Google+ for consumer (personal) accounts on April 2, 2019
January 30, 2019
In December 2018, we announced our decision to shut down Google+ for consumers in April 2019 due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations. We want to thank you for being part of Google+ and provide next steps, including how to download your photos and other content.
On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content, just make sure to do so before April. Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.
The process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts, Google+ Pages, and Album Archive will take a few months, and content may remain through this time. For example, users may still see parts of their Google+ account via activity log and some consumer Google+ content may remain visible to G Suite users until consumer Google+ is deleted.
As early as February 4th, you will no longer be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities or events. See the full FAQ for more details and updates leading up to the shutdown.
If you’re a Google+ Community owner or moderator, you may download and save your data for your Google+ Community. Starting early March 2019, additional data will be available for download, including author, body, and photos for every community post in a public community. Learn more
If you sign in to sites and apps using the Google+ Sign-in button, these buttons will stop working in the coming weeks but in some cases may be replaced by a Google Sign-in button. You’ll still be able to sign in with your Google Account wherever you see Google Sign-in buttons. Learn more
If you’ve used Google+ for comments on your own or other sites, this feature will be removed from Blogger by February 4th and other sites by March 7th. All your Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2, 2019. Learn more
If you’re a G Suite customer, Google+ for your G Suite account should remain active. Contact your G Suite administrator for more details. You can also expect a new look and new features soon. Learn more
If you're a developer using Google+ APIs or Google+ Sign-in, click here to see how this will impact you.
From all of us on the Google+ team, thank you for making Google+ such a special place. We are grateful for the talented group of artists, community builders, and thought leaders who made Google+ their home. It would not have been the same without your passion and dedication.
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133
And note that buried FAQ link: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9217723
...I have had to sit and make these tradeoffs, so please don't try to bullshit me by explaining how it's more complicated than we think. It is insanely complicated, one of the hardest things I've ever worked on, and I still know when I'm being bullshitted. Twitter chose to optimize for traffic at the expense of user experience. That's why GamerGate, that's why Trump, that's why Nazis....
-- Yonatan Zunger on Twitter (Unrolled thread)
As I'm going through my #GooglePlus contacts, updating notable names lists, and generally reviewing old posts and such -- that's the hazard of packing up and moving, it's not the putting of things in and out of boxes, but processing what they are that takes so damned long, and that's why hired professionals are so much faster, they don't know and don't care -- and am thinking about what makes Good and Bad platforms, and how to specifically articulate what is wrong with some that have turned up, well, there's this.
The accompanying Google+ thread was excellent as well, catch it whilst you can. Yes, it's been archived, but the Way Back Machine only captures a few comments from G+ posts, a long-standing issue. So most of those comments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
For those not aware: Zunger was the original chief architect of Google+, and oversaw many of both its design and policy decisions. This was a massive social network -- at least by registered profiles -- of over 3.3 billion accounts. And though its activity never quite met expectations or operator's claims, it was impressive. Yonatan knows whereof he speaks. He's seen these problems. At scale. He's moved on to other things, and from Google. He's quite busy. But damned if I wouldn't love to tap into his brain and unspool some of those lessons.
And I've got all kinds of ideas on how to specifically address the questions of free speech and free-speech maximalism, which does not in fact maximise access to free speech, online or otherwise.
The #DarcyProject should take heed. @Christian Buggedei ping
#Google #GooglePlus #GplusRefugees #Plexodus #socialMedia #freeSpeech #GamerGate #Twitter #
A key concept of keeping communities intact or at least in contact is for prominent members to be readily findable.
Bryan Ruby has compiled a list of 189 significant contributors to Google+, with links to their blogs and (generally) Twitter feeds. That's posted to his own blog: "My Massive Google+ Blogroll".
I've filled in RSS/Atom feeds for all but a small handful of the entries (with a script -- I'm obsessive, but not that obsessive), and made that available in various formats:
The entries have also been added to the #PlexodusWiki G+NNDB (Google+ Notable Names Database), another repository of public contact information: Google+ Notable Names Database. We'll roll those in with the general categories over time. Descriptions and bios would be useful.
The script can be used on other blog lists as well, though it'll likely have to be adapted to different formats. It retrieves feeds based on either HTML metadata or typical locations used -- parsing that out is ... interesting. Processing is 189 records in about 4m40s. That could be sped up considerably with parallelisation.
I've been thinking for the past few days of what might happen if we were to go back to the rudiments of, say, email or Usenet, and start building up message formats and transport protocols from there, adding and removing as necessary. What you'd need to add or take away. What new capabilities we have now.
An obvious win would be the integrated metadata -- sender, recipients (defined ... somehow), dates, and potentially useful subject lines, though even in email that's hit-or-miss now.
I'm actually considering creating an mbox or maildir archive as one format for my G+ data takeout. Payloads in bodies, first sentence or so as a subject line, and then other bits. Run "notmuch" over that and have a highly-indexed, searchable trove. For my own use, not externally accessible. Text-only. But interesting.
And mutt (a console-mode email program) would be the client interface. Or any other email client. I'd have pretty much instant search by any of of mutt's standard fields: from, to, subject, date, full text. Could add a few additional custom fields -- attached URL(s), whether or not there's an image. Maybe even thread the discussion underneath using "In-reply-to" and "References" headers.
With a few tweaks, that could be a local Usenet spool, with similar access.
It's the sort of thing I'd long wanted out of G+.
And you're right, that's not the sort of capability we're getting from the present generation of distributed Web clients. For various reasons. Though I'm increasingly asking myself "why the goddamned hell not"?
Over the past few days, for various reasons, I've been speccing out just what the entire size of the Google+ text corpus would be. Stripped of its HTML, CSS, and JS packaging, and excluding images. RFC 822 is at the very least, a reasonable foundation for a message-based format.
For Communities, it appears that there are on the order of 300 million messages, most quite short (20-40 words), call it 250 bytes of content per message, on average. The posting rate for the nearly 1 million active communities appears to be 1/wk, and over six years and some change, we get about 320 million posts. That is about 80 GB of text. Larger than my typical mail spool (slightly), but not actually a horrendous amount of data. Particularly if you think of "Google Scale" as being, well, Google Scale.
Estimating the total G+ size is a bit sketchier, but it seems that non-Community posts may be 2.5x or so larger, which nets us about 1 TB total. Mind delivered over HTML this bloats tremendously, well into the petabyte range. There are 800 kB of HTML/JS/CSS packaging in a basic G+ page to start, and then you start adding images (30% of all posts), at 4-24 MB each. That's ... considerable. A more efficient transport would reduce that tremendously.
But if the platform had been designed with the thought of distributing content permanently to end users for their access, it ... would have been pretty doable. Subscribing to a stream, via Collections, Communities, Circles, or way back in the beginning of time, Sparks, could have happened.
There's a bit of a create, modify, update, destroy cycle to deal with: some posts are edited over time (most are not). And there's the question of keeping content nobody ever reads. But really, distributing content on a wide, if not global scale, is within the realm of reason.
And yet that's not what we have.
Why not?
#socialMedia #email #usnet #rfc822 #rfc850 #doItOver #plexodus #darcyProject
I've been trying to reach out to G+ Communities especially over the course of the shutdown, a process I'd found frustrating. There are few mechanisms for directly contacting community moderators (unlike, say Reddits "message moderators" feature), and there are few forums for G+ Community owners and moderators to get and exchange information.
One of those is the Google+ Moderators community itself, the official Google channel for mods.
I've been posting and commenting there occasionally over the course of the shutdown particularly my statistical analyses of Community size and activity. There'd been little if any response.
I thought it was simply that moderators on Google+ are apathetic. It's not that.
Six weeks ago, without informing anyone, Google effectively shut down the forum. Posts are "HfR", held for review, and unless they're approved by a moderator, they won't appear for other users. The submitter does see their posts in the community and has no indication that the post has not been submitted.
You can confirm this by viewing the community from an Incognito / unauthenticated session. Doing that just now, I realised that the forum had seen no new activity since December 10, 2018.
The two screenshots here show this. The two-column view with the visible "Sign In" button at top right, shows an Incognito view, with the most recent posts being dated 6 weeks ago. The three-column view is what I see logged in as "Edward Morbius", with several posts I've submitted in the weeks since then. I can see those. Nobody else can.
Incognito view of Google+ Moderators community
Logged-in view of Google+ Moderators community
And if anyone else has posted to the community in the meantime, nobody but them can see those posts either.
This is not only extremely disrespectful and poor business practice, but it's straight up low class.
Google appear to be falling apart.
In other news: You cannot rely on the fact that posts to Google+ will be visible to other users, most especially not in Google's own Communities and spaces. Google are systematically dismantling the ability for users themselves to be informed on Google+.
If you're not using an off-Google channel for information already, start doing so NOW.
Again: there is a subreddit available at https://reddit.com/r/plexodus, devoted to the G+ exodus, run by me. You're strongly encouraged to use this. There are also /r/googleplus and /r/google, run by others, or other communities can be created. Please join one or more of these.
We have and will link other sites as well, and maintain a list of exodus communities.
The unofficial G+ Owners and Moderators Community does seem to be reliably available presently.
We're continuing to get a sense of G+ Communities and how many of these are significant, active, and have some sense of vitality.
One metric is to look by both size and recent activity.
G+ Public Communities with Recent Activity
| Members | Week | Month |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 28,823 | 39,301 |
| 100 | 63,874 | 105,166 |
Members is the reported membership of the community on its Google+ landing page. Comparison is greater than or equals.
Recency is assessed as the sampling time minus the most recent post activity, both expressed as Unix timestamps (seconds from 1970-01-01:00:00:00). Week is activity within 86000 * 7 seconds, Month is activity within 86000 * 31 seconds. Comparison is less than or equals.
From previous analysis, it's likely that only 10-20%, generously, of these communities have substantive interaction between users, as opposed to other activity, including spam or link-drops. We have not investigated this dataset yet to assess this characteristic.
Still, that would leave about 3,000 - 6,000 communities of 1,000+ members with weekly or better activity, and 4,000 - 8,000 with monthly activity, and 6k - 12k and 11k - 22k of 100+ members respectively.
There is little relationship between active engagement, measured by plus-one, comment, and reshare activity, and community size. While smaller communities (especially below 100 members) are far more likely to have no activity or no recent activity, the distribution of significant recent activity is fairly uniform across a very broad range of community sizes. On a per member engagement level, the sweet spot appears to be roughly 100 - 5,000 members, though we need to investigate this further.
Very large G+ communities are frequently not particularly engaged. See the WhatsApp Community (6.8 million members) as an example. Interestingly, this doesn't appear in a G+ Community search for "WhatsApp".
URLs for 8,107,099 Google+ Communities were read, with 3,559 found to be deleted when accessed, and 8,103,540 read successfully yielding data.
There were 7,303,513 public, and 800,382 private communities (9.877% private). Membership and post activity are available only for public communities.
Membership status was open ("Join") for 3,689,488 (45.51%), and closed ("Ask to join") for 4,414,407 (54.45%) communities, status was unavailable for 3,204 (0.04%) communities.
Membership percentiles (preliminary):
| Memb. Policy | 1% | 5% | 10% | 25% | 33% | 50% | 67% | 75% | 90% | 95% | 99% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 8 | 40 | 110 | 859 |
| "Join" | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 17 | 50 | 380 |
| "Ask" | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 7 | 13 | 58 | 158 | 1253 |
(NB: we want to confirm that the Join and Ask to join stats are correct as previous analysis showed higher membership for open-membership sites, though that sample excluded the very largest G+ communities. It's possible sense is inverted. Spot checks say we're not fouling this one up.)
Web-scraped query of 8,107,099 Google+ Community landing pages between 5 Jan and 6 Jan, 2019.
#googlePlus #communities #stats #rStats #plexodus #gplusRefugees
Attempting to come up with a uniform, or at least sensible, way to describe and classify online, user-generated, and/or social media content has been an embarrassingly frustrating task.
A stab by me at G+, "Defining Platform Capabilities". Thinking of this in terms of protocols, or rules for interoperating among elements.
Julian Bond, also at G+, "Some thoughts on ways of categorising Social Networks along different dimensions". Surprisingly similar to my views.
@Christian Buggedei took a stab at Platform Types.
This mess ("suggested fields") at #PlexodusWiki.
I can't even. "User generated and social media types and characteristics".
Warning: Here be dragons: "Signal Theory".
#wtf #socialMedia #ontologies #taxonomies #ontonomies #taxologies #taxonts #ontaxes #helpImTrappedInAHashtag #plexodus
Google's failures of communication on the G+ shutdown are staggering. Crickets, after initially promising:
Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.
And on December 12, 2018:
over the coming months we will provide users with information to help them migrate off of G+.
This extends to the Google+ About page and Google+ App page in the Android store.
Here's today's Internet Archive grab of the Google+ About page. "Discover amazing things."
But not a mention that the service will be shut down in 111 days.
Here's today's Internet Archive grab of the G+ App on the Android store.
Though we've got to give Jerome Williams props for his one-star review:
Jerome Williams
December 25, 2018
Do not waste your money on this game, it is not what it used to be. At one point, this game use to be very active with frequent updates, new content, and events. Now it rarely gets new content and when it does, it's just old content that has been recolored. The one moderator that keeps the game running, only makes decisions that will benefit Spacetime Studios rather than the community it has built. Not to mention, the extreme unprofessionalism with the way he communicates with the community.
Terrible gameplay, indeed.
Though we'll note another metric of G+ uptake: 5.5 million downloads.
#googlePlus #GplusRefugees #google #plexodus
Originally published at #PlexodusReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/ae5lsv/failure_of_communication_no_mention_of_imminent/
I'm putting this update out a week early, mostly as things are moving swiftly and I've been busy.
Covered here:
If you've been delaying making a decision on where to go after G+ is gone, you are now out of time. Make a decision NOW. I recommend picking a platform that is available now, that works now, and that addresses your needs, if not all your wants.
Pay attention to bones, not skin. Strong houses are build on solid foundations: established technology, reliable and proven leadership, a healthy community, and solid principles. New or not-yet-released platforms are an extremely high risk. If you're looking at a Community move, mailing lists, or Yahoo or Google Groups are excellent interim choices. Reddit and Groups.io might also make the cut.
I'm a fan of federated platforms, but these may not be a match for all others. Diaspora, Friendica, and Mastodon are especially reliable at this point. The first two offer much of what Google+ does, Mastodon is a microblogging platform similar to Twitter. For maintaining a reachable presence these are excellent choices.
For others, blogs or major social media platforms may well be your best options. They may have issues, but are a known quantity with established communities. Consider a beachhead on one or more federated platforms, cross-posting or syndicating your content, as a trial run. Take actions to keep your future options open.
Google Data Takeout (GDT) does not work for the purposes of migrating from Google+ to another platform for most users. There are attempts to work with Google on this, they've proceeded slowly at best and there has been NO official communication, or even indication to Google+ Top Contributors and Product Experts serving as the Google+ Help community moderation team as to when such announcements might be made.
My initial estimate was that if Google did not respond by the two-month mark, we'd likely be on our own, and that very much appears to be the case.
You'll be far more likely to succeed in exports using F+MGE.
https://blog.friendsplus.me/export-google-plus-feeds-45926c925891?gi=8990ce9d30d0
What this does is export personal content and communities, directly imports to Wordpress or Blogger, with other targets pending, as well as future incremental updates to that archive. It does not yet have a photos exporter, but I've been in touch with the developer who is working on that.
F+MGE does not and will not support mobile migrations -- users with only mobile devices and no desktop or laptop system. More below.
If you have made a GDT and successfully converted it, you may be able to ignore this advice, though again, F+MGE does incremental updates.
(We're discussing a similar and official recommendation at G+MM as well.)
For now, our suggestions are:
We'll provide more information as it's available.
G+MM, P:TBiN, and all other Google Communities and content will very likely disappear on the April 2019 shutdown, presumably at the end of the month, although even this is not clear.
The best alternate space I have to offer is #PlexodusReddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus
I've been posting content there, much of it from P:TBiN and G+MM, some strictly to the Reddit. Discussions there will survive, discussions here will not. I've yet to decide if I'll close comments here or not, but that's also likely at some point in February or March.
That's not a G+ shutdown, but it will affect third-party apps, some websites, and quite probably other tools at least temporarily, including possibly Google tools. Expect to start seeing glitches.
F+MGE does NOT use the API and will NOT be affected by this. Other archival tools, including some mobile-friendly options, will be.
127 days, or less, until Google+ is shut down.
Google changed plans without warning once. They may well do it again.
#plexodus #googleplus #gplusrefugees #plexodusReddit
Originally posted to #PlexodusReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/ac89wl/plexodus_3_month_status_update/
In the event you've missed it, I'm Edward Morbius at Google+, and you can find my Forwarding Address post, listing this Diaspora profile, there.
Additionally, you can find all your Space Alien Cat needs served at:
See the following communities:
Google+ Mass Migration: Large, AMAs, general discussion & info, noisy.
https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772
The Beginning is Near: Smaller, focused, planning & strategy group.
https://plus.google.com/communities/107813327011154265528
Wiki: #PlexodusWiki is a general-information resource: planning, processes, alternatives, directories, and more:
https://social.antefriguserat.de/
Reddit: #PlexodusSubreddit https://plexodus.reddit.com
For now, an off-site touchpoint.
