I'm not finding either MeWe or Pluspora satisfying — not to the point of wanting to quit either one, quite, but …
MeWe feels like I'm wading though glue every time I'm on the site, between the interface speed, the number of clicks to read and find stuff, and the constrained layout. I'm also annoyed at the cap on image uploads (ch-ching), which will add to the effort cost of using the service. Some of the visibility issues I've been concerned about might be going away with promised upcoming releases, but it has yet to feel like a place I am comfortable working in.
Pluspora is snappy in performance, and I like the general way it groups and sorts info. But the interface is relatively crude, stuff doesn't always seem to work as expected, and I remain dubious about the whole distributed / federated Diaspora-etc-verse as a long-term platform that will survive and be stable, let alone see significant UI improvement over time.
That last element about viability to me is important for both of these platforms. MeWe and the D* Federation are both small beans, even if they see a bump from the G+ shutdown. Their operation and sustainability models are both quite different, from what I can glean, but neither feels stable or perhaps even viable in the long haul.
(Of course, on the Internet, nothing is necessarily stable or viable for the long haul. E.g., Google+.)
Maybe I need to get back to looking at my use cases for a Social Media platform, just like a Project Manager would:
1. I want a place where I can share the stuff I find cool, thought-provoking, cathartic, cute, or whatever.
2. I want to see stuff that others find cool, thought-provoking, cathartic, cute, or whatever, with the ability to narrow down with whom I'm chatting.
3. I want a community that can and will discuss the above two items with me. Shouting into the darkness is not what I'm wanting. I'm looking for people I like, trust, respect, and/or enjoy being around. (I've had such a community at G+; where they are going matters.) I want to be able to kick people out of the conversation who are being deplorable.
4. I want the ability to use my WordPress blog as a canonical repository for as much of the stuff I write (and even comment on) as possible. That's my backup, and why G+'s closure hasn't hit me as hard as some. Promises that I can extract the data I put up there don't mean a lot to me; I want something ongoing and easy.
5. I want things to be as stable and long-lived as possible (with the understanding there are no guarantees, but taking what steps I can to make it that way).
So beyond the above two choices (and with Pluspora include the other D* sites and Friendica and Hubzilla and that whole creaking federation), what else is there?
A. Something New – People have recommended a number of other alternatives (e.g., Mind, Dreamportal, etc.). But they seem to all have very thin slices of the pie, making both the Community and Stability aspects dodgy.
B. Facebook – So everyone gasps at that, since the first words out of everyone's mouth outside of Facebook is "Never Facebook!" And, yes, it's a horribly run site, as far as exploiting user data. Is that the highest priority for me? I know folks who have actually taken serious discussions over to FB. It's certainly a (relatively) stable setup, it has the horsepower (even if the interface has some interesting gaps). A lot of the community I've had isn't there, but a lot of it is, in some measure. FB doesn't make it easy to get data out, but there are ways to work around that.
C. Twitter – Everyone, after saying NO to Facebook, follows with Twitter being unusable for reasons of tweet length, difficulty of dialog, and trolls. The first is probably the biggest issue … but, then, nothing says I can't do long-form stuff in WordPress and publish to Twitter, and use Twitter for the short shares and suck it back into WordPress. I would leave some community behind, but some of it actually is there.
D. Tumblr – At least one correspondent (+John E. Bredehoft) is using this tool, and its visibility and interoperability are pretty darned good. I find dialog on Tumblr tough, though, and I worry a bit about its long-term viability under Oath. Also, it just … man, Tumbler seems mainly for image shares, more than serious blogging (less so than Pinterist, to be sure, but in that same ballpark).
E. Reddit – I've seen serious suggestions about this. While Reddit sometimes seems like a cess pool in some of its zanier corners, I have no sense as to whether it would serve my blogging purposes. Anyone with more info is welcome to chime in.
F. Just Use My Blog – If I write it, will they come? I can post stubs, at least, out to other sites (FB, Twitter, even D* with some add-ons), but I know that ends up with fragmented discussions and overall lowered engagement. But, hell, maybe I should just go back to the old way of doing things, when bloggers were bloggers, and RSS roamed the Earth.
No conclusions here, just continuing to work some of these issues out by nattering out loud.
I'm leaning more into my blog, especially for long-form writing.
I have 17K+ followers on G+, many of which are probably not live. I have no doubt this scales on MeWe, but doubts about Diaspora*.
I expect that MeWe has a performance hit due to a server overload of new users this week. Diaspora* of course doesn't have this issue due to architecture.
My objection to Diaspora* is the complete lack of moderation tools. I really don't want to give those up these days.
I already spend a lot of time on Twitter. It's a different medium (oh and you perhaps forgot Medium?). I might start blogging on Dreamwidth again in addition, but that would be more personal and local — I have a lot of local friends in the fannish community there.
I have no inclination to go to shava.org again. People don't go to blogs, and they don't use readers — and this is my living.
How many people do you share with really? Is it more than 5K? 10K? How many do you really interact with over time (my estimate is probably 200 usual suspects over the course of a couple months).
The size of a social network really almost wouldn't matter to me if it weren't for my Patreon.
I've looked at Medium, but it feels like a more boutique long-form article writing tool than a venue for discovery, community, and discussion.
I have almost 17K in my "Geekery and Nerditude" cateogry, and around 2600 under "Serious Stuff." I know many/most of those accounts are probably moribund, at best. I would guess I interact actively (non-lurkers) with maybe 50-100 people at any given time — but that number circulates as people move into or out of orbit based on reshares of my stuff or comments I make, so there needs to be a good-sized pool to draw from.
I don't actually worry about the pool size for those purposes on either MeWe or D*, but the pool size making those platforms (or the pod I'm on at Pluspora) viable.
Which one will be in the list of platforms to share to on all major website articles going forward? That's the one to go with.
Listening. This still strikes me as a hard problem, without clear solutions.
From the Southern California correspondent: while the community features of Tumblr are clearly weaker than those of Google+, they're certainly better than Instagram (which doesn't even allow links in posts, just pictures). The propagation of Tumblr posts (via reblogging) increases the visibility, but also leads to fragmentation of the conversation.
So I'm also returning to the old blogs on a more regular basis. In fact, I'm working on a post for tomorrow (on Blogger, another Google property that could disappear at any moment) that references something that is posted on Medium. I just have to update my Disqus settings…
Dreamwidth and other livejournal derivatives provide excellent long-form posting capability, way better than mewe/diaspora/plus.
Diaspora's viability is only limited by your willingness to keep a server running: you can fork the code on github and deploy your own version on your own hardware and then you're the only person who determines how long it stays on. But since it has no corporate sponsors, it suffers as regards attracting new users.
+Dave Hill agree with you nothing looks that great atm, tried a matrix forum?
The problem with facebook is not quite their attitude towards privacy[†], but more that once you know enough people, or get enough feedback, they see you as someone who should pay them for your success. They'll demote your posts, and make you close to invisible to make you buy fake clicks which in turn will only dilute your audience, so you'll have even less of these nice discussions. It's downright hostile towards authors! Don't go there.
[†] Your fans and friends may not restrict their activities to "it's public anyways" kind of stuff. So it still seems a bit amoral.
Pretty sure all that will happen is I'll stop using G+. I'll continue to use Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit and a personal blog.
+Paul Scollon And that points to FB and Twitter, with some others possible depending on the share tool they are using.
+John Bump Yeah, I'm not really eager to run my own server, which means i'm dependent on whomever is running the D* pod I'm on.
+Dekks Herton I haven't really looked at any forum software per se. Ultimately Reddit would sort of fall into that category.
+Refurio Anachro Well, I doubt I'd get big enough for FB to think it could monetize me. 🙂
One significant drawback to FB is its very under-scrutiny nature. I've tended to fly under the radar there by posting only to Friends-etc., largely because there's no point in causing my employer (or employment) any grief with my natterings.
+Refurio Anachro
I deleted my FB account because I felt I couldn't be responsible for contributing "honeypot" content that kept people there to make them money and bring them suckers with bad opsec.
Google isn't great either. But after CA, Facebook just made me gag. I couldn't bear it.
Have you played at all with the WordPress integration on Pluspora?
+Kee Hinckley Yes. It errors out for me. My speculation (though I can find no documentation one way or another on it — and the scattered documentation for D* is one of my gripes) is that it's because the integration is with wordpress.com, not with self-hosted sites.
+Dave Hill Ugh. The twitter integration works pretty well, although it miscalculates URL length (doesn't account for the URL being shortened I think). I haven't checked to see what happens if the message is too long.
Does it do a good job of resharing WordPress articles?
FWIW, I've set up a MeWe.
I've also been getting good engagement on Pluspora via hashtags. I
Pluspora's lack of moderation tools makes it such a hard sell for me. I get trolled so often and so hard these days, it's just unpleasant.