Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

Though I suppose I've gotten accustomed to using double quotes to specify mandatory search terms, perhaps we can get back the `+foo` search syntax that was so unceremoniously taken from us and reappropriated for Google+?

When Google first announced its plans to shut down G+, originally slated for August 2019, a few of us started looking at the question of helping people and communities (in both the technical "G+ Community", and the social "community of people" senses) keep intact.

For all the ribbing G+ gets, the problem is a big one. And it's not one that's specific to Google+. As the regular parade of shut-down announcements of services and firms on HN attests, online mediated services can be cancelled, often quite abruptly. And there's often very little notice.

The world of social media sites is likely to go through more shakeups, for various reasons (and there are a number of sites presently looking pretty shaky), while the options for alternative provisioning of similar services (and the question of whether what we now call "social media" really is a net positive or something people want, need, or even should use) either personally or at a more local scale (though through what institutions isn't entirely clear) is a possibility. Projects such as IndieWeb, the POSSE initiative ("post on (your own) server, syndicate elsewhere"), federated protocols, IPFS, DAT, Beaker browser, and more (I've been discovering a lot in the past six months) may break us out of the current proprietary silo model.

Or not. The technical landscape is confusing, technical skills are limited, and the risks of DiY hosting can be large. It's a difficult trade-off. Though it's one I'd like to explore.

There are huge changes that have and will be happening on the regulatory front, from privacy to copyright to liability to propaganda and disinformation, and far more. Some of these laws and regulation seem written with self-service in mind, many do not. That's a whole 'nother field.

(I've got a To-Do item to get ahold of the EFF on these questions, as well as other groups.)

And then there's the whole fact that the tech world is in the midst of a (very well deserved IMO) backlash for its cavalier attitudes abuses and outright harm inflicted on both individuals and society as a whole. The promise of the 1990s has not been delivered.

Back to the group: we looked at the problem of migrating, realised there were many different users and groups, with different interests, and a wide range of technical abilities, from top-tier Linux kernel hackers (Alan Cox) to none at all. Some are best served by commercial solutions, for now, but many can look at federated or self-service options. We put together FAQs and Wikis and discussion forums and gathered a lot of data (we seem to have the best information outside Google on the actual size and scope of G+ users, data, and communities), and more. All inside six months.

It's been a group effort, and a lot of people contributed. I need to dig through my G+ archives to find the thank yous I'd posted earlier today, but it's substantial, and that was only a partial list.

What I hope is that others can use and be helped by what we've done.

The wiki is https://social.antefriguserat.de and there's a subreddit at https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus Both will continue to be active over coming months, we're only part-way through the process, and still need to establish ourselves in our new spaces.

For a lot of people and groups, the Internet Archive is their only hope at preserving at least some of their Google+ content. I've been working with many of them over the past six months.

Google+ had millions of active users of a wide range of technical skills, but by far the majority at the lower end of the scale. Even the ones with technical chops were often limited by budget, network bandwidth, costs, or reliability, or other factors, in what they could do.

Google+'s promise was to host text, image, and video content with Google's deserved reputation for high reliablity. The company itself is not, as many other failed social and online media services were, going out of business. It's simply decided to exit this particular activity.

The first realisation I had of the problem Google+ Communities faced was when someone commented on the subreddit I'd created about the G+ shutdown that they were wondering how they were going to move 400,000 users and content to a new home.

I didn't even know how many communities G+ had. The online information I'd found said about 5 million, but on checking it was actually 7.9 million as of late November, 2018, and over 8.1 million by January 2019. Through Loysoft (Friends+Me), I got a summary dump of all 8.1 million communities and some overview characteristics (members, posts and posting dates), and could finally start getting a handle on how many significant communities there were. That resulted in an extract of about 100,000 communities of 100+ members and posting activity within the previous 30 days, which was used for outreach and migrations. I made that freely available to anyone looking to assist in migrations.

But a lot of communities were missed, Google itself shut down the G+ Communities serving Community owners and moderators, with no notice, making outreach all but impossible.

Is there a lot of crap data out there? Yes, there is.

But there are also some gems, and the task of sorting between the two in advance of archiving it is more effort than simply archiving everything and making it available. And the Internet Archive has set itself the mission of total archival, where possible. So there's that.

The questions are ones we're discussing though at the PlexodusReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus

Sometimes the operators of a service will contact the ArchiveTeam and work with them to speed up the archival process. The file hosting service pomf.se did this when they were shutting down.

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Pomf.se#Archivin...

Yeah, keeping physical things around does only make sense if it is actually valuable to someone. Archives only accept objects actually worthwhile of keeping. But it's different for digital content, as it's so much easier to store. At least for now.

Also, Archaeologists love the garbage dumps and cesspits of old towns, literally the places where people put their least valuable things, because they weren't raided by earlier visitors and they can derive so much info about it. And it's nicely stratified so it gives some rough chronology.