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When last seen, I had lost my struggle to de-Google. Google was just too convenient and difficult to replace, and the ease of mobile commenting and reading on Google+ was a lifeline to me. Even better, they had realized that pseudonyms were not harmful and had decided to allow people to use them, so my major impetus had been removed.
Wellll now let's fast forward to 2018, when G+ is a dead cat project. It was NOT the Facebook-killer that they had hoped for, and was constantly accused of being a ghost town despite the thriving and active communities and conversations. Google+ was not a smashing success, but it was a solid social platform, with a good feature set, but it certainly was not making them money hand over fist, and I think they were having trouble figuring out how to monetize it. Also, and I think this is crucial, I think they figured out that they cannot replace human administrative effort with algorithms, and the spam-hunting and harassment adjudication was more work than they really wanted to do. That's likely a big part of why G+ died; the administrative overhead and need for human eyeballs to do it right. Google has a solid distaste for any recurring customer-facing job that can't be fully automated. (I credit Google Voice's continuing if likely up-against-the-wall existence with the fact that it's more fully automated.)
So where am I now?
I'd like a way to keep in touch with the people I met on G+, a wide variety of lovely and interesting folks. I want to be able to be syndicated via RSS (at least the public posts; I can't recall how easy it is to make a feed of the private ones), so that I'm less in a walled garden than I used to be. I wouldn't mind getting back into the habit of writing structured things so that my brain doesn't atrophy into the state of a goldfish. I'd love good mobile support, but I can't have everything. Dreamwidth has most of these things, a dedication to being a stable platform, and a proven track record. Yes, the UI is dated, yes, the mobile support is rudimentary. But the rest of it is golden.
I'm not going to put a lot of my energy onto a site that might get acquired, because I've had too many sites I love get Yahoo'd or sunsetted by Google. I'm highly suspicious of anyone with too much of a profit motive. I don't mind people making a good living out of storing my data, but I'm tired of being treated as disposable, and having the service yanked out from under me the moment it's acquired by new overlords who want to use it in other ways. I've done this dance too many times before. Dreamwidth is the known good, so it's going to be my core hub. Anything else is going to be peripheral. If I do establish any presence on the other alternatives, in order to test the waters, I'll put up a sticky here pointing to them.
I need to clean things up and get used to being here again, but... here I am. Thank you, Dreamwidth, for your stability.
Edited to add: looking back, links into Google's poorly done Photos mode are also now broken from here (I think they broke years ago and I just didn't notice, in one of the various Photos upheavals), so I guess I need to figure out photo hosting, too. Google is too prone to get bored to be a good host, Flickr got Yahoo'd, Instagram is <shudder> Facebook's, so now what?
Wellll now let's fast forward to 2018, when G+ is a dead cat project. It was NOT the Facebook-killer that they had hoped for, and was constantly accused of being a ghost town despite the thriving and active communities and conversations. Google+ was not a smashing success, but it was a solid social platform, with a good feature set, but it certainly was not making them money hand over fist, and I think they were having trouble figuring out how to monetize it. Also, and I think this is crucial, I think they figured out that they cannot replace human administrative effort with algorithms, and the spam-hunting and harassment adjudication was more work than they really wanted to do. That's likely a big part of why G+ died; the administrative overhead and need for human eyeballs to do it right. Google has a solid distaste for any recurring customer-facing job that can't be fully automated. (I credit Google Voice's continuing if likely up-against-the-wall existence with the fact that it's more fully automated.)
So where am I now?
I'd like a way to keep in touch with the people I met on G+, a wide variety of lovely and interesting folks. I want to be able to be syndicated via RSS (at least the public posts; I can't recall how easy it is to make a feed of the private ones), so that I'm less in a walled garden than I used to be. I wouldn't mind getting back into the habit of writing structured things so that my brain doesn't atrophy into the state of a goldfish. I'd love good mobile support, but I can't have everything. Dreamwidth has most of these things, a dedication to being a stable platform, and a proven track record. Yes, the UI is dated, yes, the mobile support is rudimentary. But the rest of it is golden.
I'm not going to put a lot of my energy onto a site that might get acquired, because I've had too many sites I love get Yahoo'd or sunsetted by Google. I'm highly suspicious of anyone with too much of a profit motive. I don't mind people making a good living out of storing my data, but I'm tired of being treated as disposable, and having the service yanked out from under me the moment it's acquired by new overlords who want to use it in other ways. I've done this dance too many times before. Dreamwidth is the known good, so it's going to be my core hub. Anything else is going to be peripheral. If I do establish any presence on the other alternatives, in order to test the waters, I'll put up a sticky here pointing to them.
I need to clean things up and get used to being here again, but... here I am. Thank you, Dreamwidth, for your stability.
Edited to add: looking back, links into Google's poorly done Photos mode are also now broken from here (I think they broke years ago and I just didn't notice, in one of the various Photos upheavals), so I guess I need to figure out photo hosting, too. Google is too prone to get bored to be a good host, Flickr got Yahoo'd, Instagram is <shudder> Facebook's, so now what?
