I thought circles was the best idea. I loved having a bit more control over posts. Unfortunately, only two of my friends used it, so it was worthless for me for the most part.

If only you stayed active on it, Google wouldn’t have shut it down.

Kidding lol. I used it too, it was pretty sweet. It felt like a mix of Twitter and Tumblr.

One of the things that probably killed it was Google enforcing people to use their real names on there. Which of course affected also commenting on YouTube as well.

I quite liked Google+ overall. Would have been good to have a proper competitor to Facebook.

One of its plus points (no pun intended) was that it was the first social media platform to allow more granular control over who saw your posts. You could people to ‘circles’ and limit posts to which ever circles of friends you selected (if I’m remembering this correctly).

I think at that time on Facebook, you only had the option of Public, Friends or Private. It spurred Facebook on to introduce more granular control as well. So if nothing else, Google+ was good for that.

It’s a decade later, and I’m still bitter about Google Reader’s unceremonious execution.

@Shadesto @MargotRobbie AFAIK YouTube did have google plus integration but it was optional.

Yeah, I’ve been running around the Fediverse for two years now and the name has yet to grow on me. Makes it slightly difficult to explain to people who are interested. The “iverse” part makes it sound like a metaverse type project which gives some people pause -because of the hype-flop cycle and, of course, all the crypto scams associated with that. Have to begin the pitch with “but it has nothing to do with [that], so don’t worry.” (Edit because autocorrect)

The shitaverse

I really enjoyed Google+ specifically for the Circles feature. I’m pretty sure it was the age unrestricted global Hangouts chats that killed it… Probably what this scene from Silicon Valley is about.

It’s like how Reddit is I've read it, Lemmy is Let me tell you… Think an excited person, “Lemmytellyousomething!!!”

I just think it ultimately sounds like a lousy c-grade 3rd party app. Then again, Mastodon isn’t much better. At least Reddit is basically witty.

lemmyworld might survive i think.

10 of which will be enormous and will be the vast majority of what most users see.

With open source and interoperability, this is a good thing, because then you can choose the experience you wanna have. You’re not bound to a single vendor-locked platform that’s subject to continuity issues or a degraded experience that forces you to move elsewhere and start over in terms of following/followers. You simply pack up and migrate to another instance.

unless one just feeds you tons of ads and harvests user data. That’s one reason why Gab, which is a fork of Mastodon, was defederated from most of the 'verse before Gab just went ahead and turned federation off.

You could create a Lemmy instance that made it far less user friendly to connect to other communities, and “forced” other users to join its communities because ‘that’s where everyone is’. That’s one of the reasons why there is so much fuss over how to handle threads.net when/if they turn on federation.

Then go to Aether. Nobody’s forcing you to stay here.

Yeah that’s how I felt too. I remember being excited about g+, then I also remember aggressively turning off any association to g+ because no one was on it and it kept pushing it in my face. Come to think of it gmail was similar, invite only and that, but it wasn’t forced even at release and they made it look a lot nicer than what yahoo and hotmail had going on at the time.

And the ridiculous part on top of that is that it was the exact opposite situation at first. When it first launched, you had to be a friend of a friend of a Google employee to register or you weren’t getting in. It took me a about a month before a friend of mine studying CompSci at university with the kid of some Google employee was able to pass an invitation my way.

I get the purpose was to generate hype by making it seem “exclusive” like Facebook was in the early days, but it took way too long before the people who genuinely wanted to use it were allowed to openly register for it. It was like that for 3 months, and a lot of people who gave up on trying to get an invite lost interest after the initial buzz died down.

And then Google wasn’t satisfied with upsetting the people that wanted to use it, so they had to go and upset the people who didn’t want to use it by later forcing it on everyone with a Google account.

I don’t remember what it was called? Spaces?

Circles. It was a killer feature at the time, the idea of different feeds for different groups, all in one profile. Too bad there weren’t enough groups to make it useful.

It’s strange to note that if Google had just casually worked on the feature, started gradually integrating it with YouTube etc, they might have beat insta to the punch and also really capitalized on Facebook hate. Instead they made one massive marketing blunder after another.

I think it was definitely the super long beta period where you needed an invite killed it. I knew a ton of people who were interested that gave up

I started reading your comment and thought “please be about Wave” haha. The funniest part about Wave is how they learned no lessons from it.

The invite-only model worked great for Gmail because it was an actual service with real utility and people wanted in (1GB storage was huuuuge). But with social networks, the courting ritual is reversed, because without a critical mass of users the product has no utility.

So what do they do with G+? Invite only 🤦‍♂️

And by then they had something like half the world running Android, with Google accounts… and didn’t just let them in. Youtube should have been a simple “if you want to check out G+, your Youtube account will get you in, otherwise carry on.” Instead they make it invite only and then bully youtubers into registering.

It’s just mind-boggling how little they understood about social networks after building such a wonderful piece of software for it.

Chromecasts are pretty solid

It is straightforward to run an isolated network with TCP/IP, DNS, and web servers. The hard part would be dealing with software that complains/fails if you’re not using HTTPS.

In general, you would want an offline copy of the entire software stack (e.g. a Gentoo Linux mirror) so you can patch whatever problems you encounter.

It would mpst likely come down to infrastructure maintenance capacity, so if we’re tallking regional or sub-regional maybe. For example southern california probably has enough industrial capacity that so long as raw materials can be acquired maintence would be relatively simple. But if we’re talking scattered individual townships without much intertown services then a BBS would probably be easier and more practical to maintain.

I don’t need a social network in a village, I’ll just step out of my house and yell.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/zKQfxi8V5FA

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Federation is the invisible glue that makes it all work… I have my own server but i can talk to you on lemmy.world without having to think about it or do anything special. Most people joining in the future won’t need to care federation even exists, just like they don’t care SMTP exists.

That said I suspect there will be a few mega servers anyway… just like gmail… people seem to like being where everyone else is.

I feel like the explanation using email as an example works pretty well. Most people understand how different emails from different providers can communicate, but their account is hosted on one platform.

The “circles” were awesome. It was a breeze to tweak your feed based on which circle you put someone in. Rather than get all the posts from a very hit or miss account I could pretty much say “only the top posts”.

per post scoping was nice.

I didn’t have to manually tag each account, just select the circle and publish.