Google made a huge mistake shutting down Google+. If they had built it out to integrate with Youtube, where people could have a space to Tweet, have a Main Page feed like Facebook, and post videos all in the same platform, they would have dominated the market.
I still have a hard time believing that no-one has created a platform that encompasses all of those things. Meta is doing it piece-meal but it’s all disorganized. It should be one unified platform.
That’s why I hope some developers start working on a way to integrate Lemmy and Mastodon and like… PeerTube together into a single frontend. I’d love to be able to manage my Mastodon posts and BS on Lemmy in the same website.
It was good but it didn’t really add enough or solve an actual problem. At the time, there wasn’t as much negative sentiment around Facebook. The circles were a neat concept but too much work to use for the average user.
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.
Yea I was annoyed that they were making me sign up for google+ for my youtube account so I never tried it I just set it up so I could keep using youtube.
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.
It’s kind of funny, isn’t this exactly what Meta is doing to everyone with an Instagram account? You have a shadow profile on Threads regardless if you signed up or not.
I wonder why the reaction is so different, maybe because they both are social media? Or maybe just good timing with the whole Twitter debaucle.
I think there is still concern. When Threads launched, the media was full of articles outlining commonly-stated concerns about privacy and the involuntary connection between Instagram and Threads.
The problem is that zoomers who are flocking to it in droves don’t seem to care about any of that. And I don’t think it’s due to ignorance, but probably more like generational defeatism.
Yes, there has for shure been a shift in the culture. Privacy doesn’t seem to be that big of a concern for most.
I’m not so sure it’s just the zoomers that are to blame, plenty of older people don’t seem to care either. But I do feel for the younger generation, having never known the freedom and joys of the pre-corporate internet. Then again, maybe ignorance is bliss after all.
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.
Being able to share certain posts with everyone (including your parents/grandparents) vs just your friends vs your work colleagues was a brilliant feature that seems to have just been substituted with private group chats instead. Seriously when I was a teenager the amount of stuff I thought about posting but didn’t because it would appear for everyone…
and from what i remember, staying true to typical google fashion, they fucked it up by not opening up the "beta" when they had a critical mass forming behind it. then only to force everyone into having a profile a year or whatever later. lol, too late. i think most of us understood that anything associated with google is assumed to be a never-ending "beta", so no idea what they were thinking or waiting for.
That’s easy to say now, but Orkut (another Google social network, mostly used in Brazil) also had a beta invite system… And that helped it grow tremendously. The secrecy and “status” of getting invited made people go wild - they would even sell invites.
The strategy can work. It’s just very timing sensitive.
Google wasn’t comfortable in letting it grow naturally over time. They tried really hard to push on people by combining it with other more popular google products when it didn’t really make sense (i.e. Youtube). Also, as a teen at the time google plus just felt nerdy and weird. It didn’t really feel like something they cool kids would use so no one used it.
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.
In 12 years, selfhosting will be so cheap and one-push-button easy that everyone will have their own instance and federated with each other. It will be called Neo-Geocities 2.0.
Well, not really the same thing but I saw this the other day. I think it is awesome, but that is probably only nostalgia talking. It is a geocities website for the current day!
I don’t care about the name much, but it’s going to make searching for anything on here through a regular search engine cumbersome. Lemmy is just going to bring up results to the late motorhead singer
Yeah, I know. If Lemmy get’s big enough it’s going to be the top searches just like Reddit was. Until that time though, it’s going to be a whole lot of power stache lol.
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.
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)
I think the biggest miss Google had was with Google Wave. It was way ahead of its time, and absolutely crashed and burned at launch because of the invite-only model.
I bought a Google OnHub router, which was amazing. It was marketed as the most “future-proof” router at the time. Then Google made Google WiFi mesh routers around a year later, and OnHub was never marketed or mentioned again. Now, in addition to my already concerning privacy issues around Google services, I don’t trust that they will release quality, supported products.
I threw mine in the trash in less than a month, didn’t even bother trying to resell it and just wanted it gone. What a pile of fucking shit that thing was. I spent more time troubleshooting than watching.
I can’t say I had these problems back when I was using them, but that doesn’t mean much because mine are sitting in a box somewhere and worthless since most TVs and streaming players support it now.
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.
I bought Cyberpunk for Stadia and received a Chromecast Pro and a Stadia controller with it for free. I sold them both which covered the cost of Cyberpunk which later got refunded when Stadia went offline. So I actually made money by using Stadia.
Killed 15 days ago, YouTube Stories (originally YouTube Reels) allowed creators to post temporary videos that would expire after seven days. It was over 5 years old.
This is extremely interesting. So many products that I’ve never heard of and many of them were actually around for 6-12 years before being axed or coming up on death soon. A lot of these I had heard of and even used occasionally over the years and I didn’t realize were gone now.
At this point I’m just waiting for them to axe YouTube out of the blue and with maybe 2 days warning. If Google announces a project nowadays I just assume they’ll kill it off at some point.
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.
This ! Also, I'm kind of disappointed how many of my peers just waited for the #reddit#blackout to pass, so they can go back to buissness as usual. Supringsingly, to me, there are a lot of people who enjoy corponet just fine.
I would wager most of nowadays instances have either fallen into obscurity or just finished existing, I think we will see instancea more focused in scalability if thr fediverse grows in popularity, whoch will kind of dominate the space.
If I had to guess for a few I would say beehaw and lemm.ee will also still be alive in some way or another, but I dont think they will keep being as big in proportion to other instances as they are now.
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.
I don’t really know what is the problem with google+ except they are born in the wrong time where Facebook are still on the rise, instagram is new and trendy and Zuckerberg is not dreaming on metaverse
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.
It was a pretty cool platform but their biggest problem was making it invite only, therefore forcing it to be smaller than competing platforms. Invite only may work for Gmail but not for social media.
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.
I think that’s against the plan with Lemmy and distributed instances, but they can improve sign up, and make it possible to migrate your user between instances, or do some unique username across all instances.
A cool feature would also be that a user could backup all their posts and votes.
Simple fix, just don't join big instances, create new communities on small instances and self-host. If everybody does so, nobody has an interest into coercing users in a hermetic system, because they have far more to loose through possible defederation
We should have gotten something that’s actually decentralised and P2P like Aether.
What we got was centralised servers + a glorified RSS feed that enables even more echo chambers than Reddit did… The fediverse is doomed to remain irrelevant imho
I remember getting a few of my friends to try G+ with me, then getting in and realizing we were the only ones there. Feels like Lemmy already has more people than that ghost town ever did.
Facebook and Google was always about friends family and local before any random and stranger interaction becomes relevant.
Reddit and Lemmy is all about strangers. Oftentimes you dont even want people to know you or care about that. So userbase is way easier to create without feeling as if it was too small.
Facebook started locally and slowly created circles until the entire world found their friends and families and joined themselves
Google+ didn’t work because they didn’t push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.
Yes - I’m being serious they didn’t push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn’t inadvertently leak your info.
If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we’d still have Google+ today.
Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we’d still have Google Talk. I don’t recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don’t have to use.
They started out like that, but then they tried to force it down everybody’s throats and it backfired. It was mismanaged from start to finish, which is a shame because it really was good despite Vic Gundotra.
Eh, the whole reason I refused to use it WAS because they forced it on me so hard. Being forced into having one of you wanted to watch YouTube did my head in and I refused to use it. Same reason I don’t use Microsoft edge even though it’s a little less shit now
Nah dude, there’s no way that would have worked, the reason why g + backfired was literally because everyone on yt was forced to make a g account to just comment.
I think you misunderstand what they’re saying. You shouldn’t have had to make an account. G+ should’ve just been a part of your existing Google account.
Absolute truth. I was onboard with G+ early. I handed out invites to everyone I could. I pushed my spouse to use it. Ultimately what killed it was it being invite-only, and mainly only tech enthusiasts were on the site initially. When other people got invited by them, and the newer users didn’t see their friends and family on the site, they just left and never revisited it. That was my experience anyways. The model Threads used will be the model that all large social media sites use to roll out new social media products, it just makes the most sense.
Depends on how dense or spread out it is. If it’s dense and everything is in one place you might not need anything more than just going outside.
If it is spread out though you may want communication methods other than mail and if people already have the computers and existing infrastructure (many places have cables for network and phone lines) to set up a local network then that might be the best option.
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.
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.
You would have to run your own CA and get everyone to install your root cert on their devices. That what happens already with tech like smart cards and SSL inspection firewalls. It’s all about trusting the connection implicitly.
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