The #fediverse has always added new platforms by using current mainstream social media as a model, eg: mastodon as the federated twitter, pixelfed as the federated instagram etc... I wish someone made the federated G+ because even tho it never took off #gplus was the superior social media concept. Like, cirlces? So ahead of its times!
#gplus
![Screenshot from the wikipedia page titled: Google+.
Circles was a core feature of the Google+ Social Platform. It enabled users to organize people into groups or lists for sharing[62] across various Google products and services. Organization of circles was done through a drag-and-drop interface until a site redesign in 2015 reduced it to a simple checkbox interface.[63] Once a circle was created, a Google+ user could share specific private content to only that circle. For example, work-themed content could be shared with only colleagues, and one's friends and family could see more personal content and photos. The option to share Public or with Everyone was always available.[64]](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/113/959/309/463/172/055/original/40a9e7fcc66548a4.png)
@MLE_online PS to my other comment, introducing you both just in case you didn’t meet on #GPlus @LJ
@CStamp @BobHorowitz well I guess I may do that. Unsure whether homies that knew about it back in G+ would remember when I shared it then #GPlus +GPlusRefugee
I wouldn't have thought it, but I now miss #GPlus (G+). The platform worked comparatively well as an interest-orientated way to get information & exchange ideas - (almost) without unnecessary rubbish. Much of #SocialMedia, including the praised land of #Bluesky, is simply unbearable.
@jupiter_rowland @danie10 @thenexusofprivacy @mikedev
Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.
No one but me seems to site this nowadays, but masto doesn't even really shine with respect to cost in terms of system resources and stability until you approach the 20,000 user account mark. What? Why would you do that? Back when these stats were being bandied about, Pleroma was showcasing its new #Gopher protocol (browsing) support, and reminding people that it felt perfectly at home on an #rPi. No such claim was ever made for masto, lolz. That doesn't mean that the other platforms aren't just as capable of scaling vertically... but... why? Who's going to foot the bill? Who's going to manage all of those un-vetted people creating accounts on your machines? Why would someone bother with that in the first place?
Community? Nope - there's no sense of community on masto servers, and I'll get to that later. Because you want to create your own private Idaho? Probably. mastodon.social is one of, if not the, largest deprecated monolithic silos existing in the Fediverse today. Why? What possible benefit could be derived by driving a million people into a single funnel under the auspices of telling them that they're escaping that very same model? It's ludicrous.
No matter what happens in the short term, Eugen is assured of his parachute and comfortable retirement fund, except for the part where he forgot to have his new significant other sign a pre-nup - that might dash his net worth later, but that's another consideration entirely. I hope his marriage is actually a long and fruitful one that lasts forever, he's not a bad guy, he's just been courted and corrupted by the "Ooh shiney" phenomenon of financial entrapments that come with relative success in the media and pop culture.
The reason masto needs to be hard forked (several times, IMO) is not to create a better masto that will lend itself to DeSoc, #smolweb, and self-hosting on people's home networks, but rather, to further dilute the trademark, and especially the brand, effectively killing it if possible, supplanting it with Fediverse instead. People like to bounce around that term inclusivity, well, this accomplishes that.
Forks of masto aren't going to create a better masto. No way. Sure, some improvements on this one, other features on that one, but dilution of the brand until it is only as significant as any other deserving Fediverse platform is and should be the ultimate goal. It's not well suited, architecturally for horizontal scaling anyway, unless you don't mind throwing all those system resources at it that could better serve you elsewhere with something like #GoToSocial or one of the #Misskey and #Pleroma family fork members.
True leaders in the Fediverse will initially be those platforms that have planned ahead and accommodate other DeSoc protocols, arguably Fediverse protocols, at this time, #Diaspora, #OStatus, #Nomad, #Zot, and even others that some #Fedizens turn their noses up at, like #nostr and #Bluesky's #ATP. #ActivityPub is NOT the end-all, be-all for the future. It is the golden calf of today, and just as others that have come before, it will morph and evolve or be obviated by others that will be plugged into the platforms currently running it - #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and Streams are prime examples of this, and Friendica especially, considering it's the only extant original member of the Fediverse for all intents and purposes. One could say that Friendica is the #Slackware of the Fediverse, lolz.
With respect to Friendica in particular, but also Hubzilla and others that have arrived at this obvious conclusion, ActivityPub is merely the major vehicle by which it communicates with other decentralized social communications systems on the Internet. I don't think it has ever lost sight of that, like another of its contemporaries, #GNU_Social did.
Hemming large masses of people onto a single (and at this time appearing to be) and open walled garden has the immediate effect of control over large swaths of population - you can say this, but not that. You can think this, but not that. You can be this, but not that. You can believe this, but not that - under penalty of excommunication.
In reality, we don't have strong friendships with our neighbors - that's why we have fences. We wave to them and say hi, call the cops when they're on vacation and see someone suspicious lurking about their property. That's about the extent of being a neighbor. We invite our friends and coworkers over for BBQ's and to swim in our pools, not so much our neighbors.
The current masto social architecture is the antithesis of that, and so is it's physical architecture - put all the lobsters in the same pot of boiling water. Turn on and off their ability to speak all at once. Force them en masse to endure advertising blitzes (Oh, mark my word that's coming) decided upon by the server admin. It's like Baba O'Reilly by The Who - "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".
That's not the promise of Fediverse. it's the antonym.
masto also hinders innovation, attempting to define, dictate even, what should and should not be available - Nomadic identity is but one emerging facet of what is fracturing the masto monopolistic initiative - and that's a good thing, because with the help of FEPs, already, others are adopting various cooperative models for this as well, but discussing that now, and here, at this time, is more of a tangent so I'll get back to the point.
Jupiter:
> That's why people still fork Mastodon to add features that are available just about everywhere else.
Indeed it is, and why it has managed to enjoy a reasonable level of notoriety. There's also the wholly undeserved notion of community that actually, in direct opposition to, masto has continually sought to break and in a very big way, break.
There are certainly platforms (mostly forumware) that curate a sense of community, but those days are largely past. Whether it was #gplus, #Myspace, #Faceplant, #InstaSPAM, or #Twitter; because just as it is in real life, #COMMUNITY is that which you define for yourself through your connections - your follows and those who choose to follow your account. The biggest failures in the Fediverse that I've personally observed are those that seek to localize, geographically or by shared interest, a monolithic ivory tower of sameness and similarity amongst people.
I felt so awful for one guy who, so enthusiastically upon discovering the Fediverse, started registering domain names corresponding to several states, thinking that he would be successful in launching a geographically oriented family of masto based servers tending to the shared interests of people by offering them a place to congregate. He quickly discovered the fatal flaw in his model, but was stuck with hefty data center bills to maintain all these masto servers that were largely uninhabited.
Trying to get rid of your masto subscribers when you figure out that you need to egress from it is not an easy task without disenfranchising your user base. I know, because a few years back, not long after @Gled archived his #mastodo fork and urged everyone to adopt Pleroma instead, I face the daunting task of trying to convince my user base to migrate elsewhere - it took more than a year to accomplish!
Danie:
> thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it?
In a nutshell, because it serves to, at the very least, dilute the masto brand, and more likely kill it. It has served its purpose and now that it has been exposed as a vehicle antithetical to #DeSoc, it's time to deprecate it.
My introduction to the #Fediverse occurred when I stumbled upon an earlier incarnation of #Friendica, started looking at #Red_Matrix, and discovered that the monolithic model, if not having been shown the door, had at least been handed its hat.
The problem at that time, was the effect of Prettiness, and of course, UX. Friendica wasn't too bad in that latter sense, when compared to that of Faceplant, but it sure didn't even come close to being as pretty as Faceplant - or even Myspace, which had only recently fallen into the abyss. That's changed A LOT, even in just the past year, with respect to Friendica and Hubzilla - they're much more intuitive for a layperson parachuting to the ground after jumping from the cesspit over at Faceplant.
I think that more than anything, not being pretty enough for the subjugated chattel coming from Twitter and Faceplant, was the most difficult thing for onboarders to embrace. Mike placed all of his focus on functionality and forward thinking vision with respect to what these and later efforts could provide the masses, but the "prettification" was left to others who didn't step up for the challenge for many years. I'm all for features six-ways to Sunday, but I also feel that many things need to be hidden from the landing page a new user sees upon account creation - the very basics they expect should be there, akin to those available in the deprecated monolithic space; users expect this, but they don't yet know they not only want, but really need all of these other feature sets too, yet some things should left, IMO, to be discovered later by the user.
And in my conversations years ago with Mike, I gleaned as much from him [paraphrased, of course]: "Here's this really bitchen gift for the masses, it does all this kewl stuff, now I leave it up to others to make it pretty" (and with a sense of coherency that these former subjugated chattel can initially get their heads around). Putting all that stuff right in their face was awe inspiring, but foreboding at the same time for many.
Well, finally, people are making it pretty :) And they're also moving much of the overwhelming busy-ness elsewhere in the UI. As a result, there's been an explosion of adoption - not even primarily from former masto folks either.
I'd like to touch on the notion of community one more time in closing. It might be convenient for n00bie onboarders to glean a bit about how a particular platform functions, but just like in your own neighborhood where you live, you make friends elsewhere mostly - at work, at functions of the hobbies you engage in, with friends you meet at the grocery store or libraries, and the beaches or on hiking or 4x4 weekend excursions. It's the same way in the Fediverse, you make your friends through connections here and there through people you discover along the way, and 99% of them ARE NOT on your particular server instance.
They don't need to be either, because this is the Fediverse :)
⛵
.
For Google Plus users only: A Walk Down Memory Lane.
Five years ago today, Google commenced the shutdown of Google Plus. The process took several hours as different geographic regions of the world went dark, one after another.
Here is a blog post with screen shots of what our beloved social networking platform used to look like.
@ILoveNumAn
the one G+ feature I'm still hoping gets implemented here sooner rather than later btw, is #Collections.
I loved how you could categorise your posts into Collections about a certain topic, and could make certain collections opt-in rather than opt-out by default, and that you could opt-out and opt-in of other people's specific topics, rather than having to follow all or nothing from that person...
@ILoveNumAn welcome!
While Mastodon doesn't have native groups yet, there are some other Fediverse alternatives that do. The most notable example probably is #Friendica: https://fedi.tips/friendica-a-flexible-fediverse-server-type-with-long-posts/
While I do have a Friendica account myself, @fixato@libranet.de, I don't find myself using it actively. In theory it's closer to what #GPlus is, in reality it just doesn't feel as polished, and I haven't been able to curate a home feed and 'circles' with it that keeps me active on the platform on a regular basis. The user interface and user experience of #Mastodon just feels a lot more thought through and polished.
The same applies to #Diaspora, the platform #GooglePlus probably took the whole idea of Circles from, where they are called "Aspects". There's also #Hubzilla, which has even more features, but which just felt slow and cobbled together. I would suggest you give them all a try though, as your experience and needs might differ from mine!
Now, having said that Mastodon doesn't have native #groups yet, there is some third party support for them in the form of #Guppe (https://a.gup.pe/). Check out @FediTips for a good primer: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/
Mastodon 'recently' did add a feature that reminded me of the early days of G+, which should help you discover people a bit easier than manually trawling hashtags, and that's the ability to follow a hashtag, so its posts will automatically appear in your home feed.
Finally, if you like the overall interface of Mastodon, but miss being able to format your posts by wrapping words in asterisks, underscores and the likes like G+ supported (though with less frustrations imho), or write posts longer than 500 characters (like this one), then I would suggest you also check out #GlitchSoc, a fork of Mastodon that adds a bunch of features which Mastodon for example itself has shown a resistance to to add. https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/
Best advice I can give is to just try out several different alternatives and then settle on the one that best suits your needs. :)
Anyway, I hope this wall of text has been of some help. 😅
Spricht mir aus der Seele der Artikel 😭😭😭
G+ war so ein großartiges Netzwerk und die Features bis heute unerreicht.
#googleplus #gplusrefugee #gplus
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-plus-missing-features-to-today/
The Piggy Opera!
I made the mistake of originally publishing this photo at http://www.viewbug.com/photo/5280904 back in December, 2013 - don't do that! Viewbug kinda really sucks and you can't even download your own photos. Here's the specs I have on this:
From, "The Piggy Opera", Concordia Elementary School, San Clemente, California.
The tell tale signs of a child who still sucks her thumb is apparent in this portrait of a girl with a starring role in a school play.
KODAK DC4800 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA
Aperture f/4.5 Shutter 1/250
* We didn't really have a #Fediverse back then, although we did have a few platforms that still exist and are the major parts of the Fediverse today, such as #Friendica (had a couple of name changes since then), StatusNet/PumpIO, etc., but none of that is really important.
* This is the first photo of a series - I'm prolly going to try out "collections" and make this part of one. I still have a bad taste left in my mouth from the #gplus days when they launched collections, but I digress.
* The Piggy Opera was her first grade school play, and from an age of innocence that eventually evolves into some awareness on the childs part that I think most parents loathe - we always wish for them to remain the "Itty Bitty Baby" that we carried everywhere on one arm; and this was in the last months of when she was still light enough for me to carry her everywhere.
#tallship #ginger #piggy #The_Jennifer #Piggy_Opera #Children #closeup #closeups #faces
I made the mistake of originally publishing this photo at http://www.viewbug.com/photo/5280904 back in December, 2013 - don't do that! Viewbug kinda really sucks and you can't even download your own photos. Here's the specs I have on this:
From, "The Piggy Opera", Concordia Elementary School, San Clemente, California.
The tell tale signs of a child who still sucks her thumb is apparent in this portrait of a girl with a starring role in a school play.
KODAK DC4800 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA
Aperture f/4.5 Shutter 1/250
* We didn't really have a #Fediverse back then, although we did have a few platforms that still exist and are the major parts of the Fediverse today, such as #Friendica (had a couple of name changes since then), StatusNet/PumpIO, etc., but none of that is really important.
* This is the first photo of a series - I'm prolly going to try out "collections" and make this part of one. I still have a bad taste left in my mouth from the #gplus days when they launched collections, but I digress.
* The Piggy Opera was her first grade school play, and from an age of innocence that eventually evolves into some awareness on the childs part that I think most parents loathe - we always wish for them to remain the "Itty Bitty Baby" that we carried everywhere on one arm; and this was in the last months of when she was still light enough for me to carry her everywhere.
#tallship #ginger #piggy #The_Jennifer #Piggy_Opera #Children #closeup #closeups #faces
@dansup where can I read more on what Collections are?
Is it similar to what #GooglePlus called #Collections?
(I was sure I had made a post tagged with that to explain what #GPlus' Collections were, but now I can't find it...)
@stevenkennard here is Susanne
@Susanne711
Welcome!
A friend from G+, to any who remember us in those days.
#GooglePlusRefugee #GooglePlus #GPlus #followFriday #photographer
Back in the early days of social networks I enjoyed trying out new networks. Even since the closure of #GooglePlus (and our collective archiving methods during the #Plexodus beforehand), I haven't really bothered.
I mean, sure, I tried out several alternatives during the #GPlus exodus, such as #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and re-tried #Diaspora* (though the pod I was one also shortly after announced its closure), and of course #Mastodon, just to find a new 'home'.
However, my heart was no longer really in it. For now Mastodon suits my needs (or at least the #GlitchSoc fork; shout out to those wonderful #GlitchSocial folks!) well enough, and I can't be arsed to even look at all the various alternatives that have popped up in my timelines since. (Most of which seem to show up for me, so I'm guessing most of them didn't really pan out anyway.)
Part of me still misses G+ though; especially its early days, and some of the later features such as #Collections and #Groups.
Mit einer knappen halben Stunde Verspätung schon bei der Bereitstellung des ICE in Dortmund jetzt auf dem Weg nach Nürnberg zum Treffen von Ex-#GPlus'ern und #Okuna-Usern auf der #Whiskymesse #SingleMalt.
Spent a lot of time rescuing 20 yrs of data & photos this week.
Much of my 2010s photography was trustingly shared with #EvilGoogle #GPlus (for 8 years) and then wiped out - along with myriad communities, groups, collections - April 2, 2019.
Happily I 'mirrored' some of my most popular collections on my own site. Here's a favorite: Cuba.
Click/tap on photos &/or text links for a (free, un-tracked) self-tour around Havana, Cienfuegos, and Hemingway's home.
This GIF of me - from a livestream in 2023 where I did surgery on a cardboard shark to make to it foldable - is kind of difficult to explain. 😆
It was the good old Google+ days and I wanted to bring @Fluffy with me to visit online friends in the USA, so I had to make @Fluffy able to fit into my luggage and I decided to do this "operation" on a Google Hangout, so my G+ friends could participate. Those were the days. 😊
While (re)watching #TragedyGirls (2017) I noticed this poster on a wall in the background of a scene. Brings back memories of the days where G+ was popular enough to make it into films.
Also - let's count the plurals (why?!?!):
⬩ Twitter: 3
⬩ Facebook: 2
⬩ Instagram: 2
⬩ YouTube: 2
⬩ Google+: 2
Hey, remember the first #enshittification of #Google, when every single Google app got #GPlus awkwardly crammed into it because individual googlers’ bonuses were calculated based on how and whether they got people to use G+?
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst