{"id":137303,"date":"2018-10-10T16:31:32","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T22:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/10\/where-to-go-after-google-plus.html"},"modified":"2018-10-10T16:31:32","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T22:31:32","slug":"where-to-go-after-google-plus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/10\/where-to-go-after-google-plus.html","title":{"rendered":"Where to go after Google Plus?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I've spent a fair amount of time the past couple of days investigating the two most commonly identified alternatives: MeWe and Pluspora.<\/p>\n

(Note that everyone's suggestions on the matter always start with "HELL NO, I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE NEAR FACEBOOK …" and I feel largely the same way, so …)<\/p>\n

Both have some positive aspects. Both have some drawbacks. Here's what I've noted:<\/p>\n

MeWe<\/b><\/p>\n

PRO
— Cleaner, more elegant interface.
— Feels like a professional, finished product.<\/p>\n

CON
— Feels Facebooky. Lots of comment nesting and hidden stuff. Lots of white space. Narrow column of content.
— No "public posts" — posts go to followers, or into groups, which would seem to hamper discovery. Groups kind of act like collections, except someone has to find them, then join them.
— The Open Groups selection is largely full of right-wing \/ Randian \/ conspiracy theorist \/ anti-science \/ men's rights \/ Trump-and-guns whackadoodles of every variety. There are exceptions, but it's kind of crazy. (The chief of MeWe is a hyper-free-speech conservative\/libertarian, so I have the sense a lot of groups that have been booted from Twitter or Facebook have staked out space on MeWe.)
— Almost all of the Open Groups I checked out because the descriptions were of interest were ghost towns, full of dubious posts, or both.
— To look at a group to see if it's worth your time, you have to join it. Then to quit it is a multi-step process.
— No help system I've been able to find.<\/p>\n

Diaspora<\/b><\/p>\n

Pluspora is a single pod of the distributed Diaspora network.<\/p>\n

PRO
— Feels Plussy for some reason.
— Full Markdown formatting, so headers and bullets and numbered lists and blockquotes.
— Cross-post to Twitter
— Cross-post to WordPress (that one's huge to me)
— The "HQ" staff have seemed pretty responsive on at least some of the question threads I've seen.
— Preview your post
— The Recent Notifications bell doesn't get confused the way G+ did<\/p>\n

CON
— Also feels like a "Loving Hands at Home" effort, and the v 0.7.6.0 version accurately portrays the sense that it's about 3\/4 of the way to a full production release.
— It's a voluntary development effort with no real roadmap. If no devs are interested or have cycles to implement a given suggestion, it doesn't get implemented.
— It's a voluntary hosting and management effort, which concerns me about the longevity of any given pod, as well as how spam and abuse issues are going to be dealt with (h\/t +<\/span>Lauren Weinstein<\/a><\/span>)
— The system is deployed in a federated multi-site fashion, which on the one hand makes it more robust for some purposes, but each server\/"pod" and the federation as a whole seems fragile, the traffic between them sometimes gets constrained, and the federated aspect makes code updates more problematic.
— No Groups\/Communities.
— Hashtags are critical for content to be found.
— No "Collections" – people follow everything about you that you post. So people who love my pop culture posts but find my politics problematic are kind of in trouble (they can follow a hashtag, but then they get everything in it). The Aspect (Circle) mechanism requires significant curation of followers by the content producer (not useful unless you are making an intentional walled garden).
— No post or comment re-edits. (Including to put in hashtags.)
— Twitter (and WordPress and Tumblr) seems to be a manual step during posting — but no backsies if you forget to do it.
— Blocking individuals is similar to G+, except you have to go to their profile and it does nothing to block their comments in other people's posts, only your own.
— Help documentation is scattered and difficult to navigate or search.
— Preview is accurate for text, but not for how links or images will be shown.
— No likes on comments. Which seems trivial, but really constrains feedback.
— Reshares don't allow you to do a preface to the reshare; you have to add a comment to it instead. (Better to post it with an internal link?)
— The WordPress integration isn't working for me, and I've not been able to get any clue as to why or how.<\/p>\n

Both also lack something important to me: members that are something other than in individuals. Where's the Ars Technica or the NASA or the Atlantic or the WaPo or New York Magazine, among many other organizations and media outlets? They were on Google+ (even if many other orgs had fallen off), but they aren't on Diaspora or MeWe that I've been able to find. That means pulling info from other sources.<\/p>\n

Which makes me think I might be increasing my Twitter<\/b> use. Even at 280 chars, it's a constraint to meaningful posting, and the comment structure is a bit sketchy, but everything else is still out there. <\/p>\n

So where do I stand on MeWe vs Diaspora (Pluspora)? At this point, it's still a toss-up.
— MeWe is by far the more polished product, but what it does is a bit more limited, the group model feels constraining, and the community as a whole isn't wowing me.
— Diaspora (Pluspora) has the potential to be a more powerful tool, and more like Google+, but it's still effectively in gamma testing, the distributed model is sketchy, and it doesn't do some things I really want it to (yet?).<\/p>\n

I'm not ready to put my money (attention) down on either of them. I'll be sticking around here for a bit and see what develops.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n
\n<\/a>\u00a0\n<\/div>\n

Original Post<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I've spent a fair amount of time the past couple of days investigating the two most commonly identified alternatives: MeWe and Pluspora. (Note that everyone's suggestions on the matter always start with "HELL NO, I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE NEAR FACEBOOK …" and I feel largely the same way, so …) Both have some positive … Continue reading “Where to go after Google Plus?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137304,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-plusposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/optimize-google-plus5B15D.jpgimgmax=660.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13441,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/12\/11\/the_last_airbender_and_it.html","url_meta":{"origin":137303,"position":0},"title":"The Last Airbender and its casting","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 11-Dec-08 10:02pm","format":false,"excerpt":"So lots of brouhaha over the casting for the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie (the actual movie is dropping the \"Avatar\" part of the name), largely because it's all...","rel":"","context":"In "Animation \/ Cartoons"","block_context":{"text":"Animation \/ Cartoons","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-cartoons"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2014,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/03\/26\/shocked_shocked.html","url_meta":{"origin":137303,"position":1},"title":"Shocked! 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Short story why: a dated and hick-like reputation, lots of competitors, lots of different other groups to hate, and, of course, the Internet (why spring for a white robe when you can hang out in a hate chatroom wearing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":130714,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/20\/its-good-to-have-important-friends-in-congress-just-ask-exxon.html","url_meta":{"origin":137303,"position":4},"title":"It's GOOD to have important friends in Congress. 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