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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree, and the level of user on G+ was of a techy IT variety of person. It was great and you could have good conversations.
Lemmy really has that feel now. Enjoy it till either the general public gets hold of it and it turns into a cesspool or it slowly dies a death.
Personally I hope to face neither of those scenarios, but history is not on our side.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Killed over 1 year ago, Cameos on Google allowed celebrities and other public figures to record video responses to the most common questions asked about them which would be shown to users in Google Search results. It was over 3 years old.
Imagine googling "does Bruno Mars is gay?" and Bruno Mars himself shows up to tell you if he is or doesn't
I honestly loved the concept and would probably have been a customer if I could afford it.
Contrary to your description, it was mostly celebrities doing custom greetings for fans, sometimes as themselves, sometimes in character and usually bought for people as a surprise gift.
Amongst others, there was Jim Rash wishing a Community fan a happy birthday in character as Dean Pelton and dozens if not hundreds of short to medium length videos of Dave Mustaine from Megadeth recording super wholesome and sincere messages for specific fans.
Can you honestly tell me that doesn't sound great?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
unless one just feeds you tons of ads and harvests user data. That's one reason why Gab, which is a fork of Mastodon, was defederated from most of the 'verse before Gab just went ahead and turned federation off.
You could create a Lemmy instance that made it far less user friendly to connect to other communities, and "forced" other users to join its communities because 'that's where everyone is'. That's one of the reasons why there is so much fuss over how to handle threads.net when/if they turn on federation.
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.
I think a big help to avoid this is if any "official" apps automatically point to something like lemmyverse search or Fediverse Observer rather than Join Lemmy or any singleinstance. Mastodon.socialwas already by far the largest before the only app named "mastodon" available in the major mobile repositories was built to automatically have you create an account on mastodon.social to "Make it easier for the normies".
The fact that I dont' even know the name of any lead developers of #lemmy as opposed to /u/[email protected] is probably a good sign too.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I honestly hope lemmy will not die. It will have to become simpler though. For many people, it will be simply way too complicated to wrap their head around the fact of many instances and most of them will worry about not being able to interact with people from other instances.
Also, the main lemmy web app is not necessarily good and alternatives such as wefwef are far easier to use.
We just need to be better about simplifying the explanation. Don't tell people "it's a federated website using an activitypub backend to communicate like mastodon, but only links to federated lemmys not including mastodon instances...." Tell them "it's a fourm that shares posts and comments with other fourms that agree to work together". If they want more detail they can easily find it themselves.
Federation is the invisible glue that makes it all work.. I have my own server but i can talk to you on lemmy.world without having to think about it or do anything special. Most people joining in the future won't need to care federation even exists, just like they don't care SMTP exists.
That said I suspect there will be a few mega servers anyway.. just like gmail.. people seem to like being where everyone else is.
I feel like the explanation using email as an example works pretty well. Most people understand how different emails from different providers can communicate, but their account is hosted on one platform.
I mean this post has 1200 upvotes. Considering most people don't engage with the voting system that makes me think that there's a decent amount of people here. At the very least it means there's a lot of people here who engage with the community. More come every day. If this post were on Reddit, it would be on r/all right now. That's not bad for a community with a fraction of the users.
I think that in 10 years this place will be doing alright. I think the growth that's happened in the last few months won't last, but I think that growth will still steadily happen. The reddexodus doesn't happen every day but with most social media platforms shitting their geriatric pants more and more lately, I think a consistent flow of refugees will come here.
I liked the idea of circles. I'm part of multiple social circles and what might be interesting for one could very well be meaningless for another circle.
I also liked YouTube chat. I had Messenger at the time, but I could contact my family on YouTube chat too. So I deleted my Facebook account and switched to chatting over YouTube. Then they shut it down, so I just let it be and stopped talking with my family.
The "circles" were awesome. It was a breeze to tweak your feed based on which circle you put someone in. Rather than get all the posts from a very hit or miss account I could pretty much say "only the top posts".
By then I predict the big corp news media will report on Lemmy like it’s the new 4chan. Unmoderated instances that no major instance links to will give them plenty of ammunition. Non technical users will believe it to the frustration of all Lemmy.
Not trying to be a downer when they attack you, you know you’re winning
Geez it's just so incredibly sad to me that facebook has survived this long and even THRIVED while probably being the worst version of what they do, and being the most evil doing it
True. Those of us on social media at the time moved from MySpace moved because it was a step up as far as keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos and links. It was uncluttered and well designed and no annoying advertising. Just worked. It’s a clusterfuck of awfulness now.
It was certainly fun back in the day. I was in middle school when I noticed everyone around me starting to use it and it was a bit of a mixed bag for me… at that point not everything was social media so it wasn’t such a hellscape and was a bunch of fun, but even then I think it had a negative impact on me, my friends, and our social lives. I don’t know what it was like before, but seeing that a popular kid had a huge number like 100 notifications on their Facebook could not have been healthy—I don’t think that kids need analytics on how socially successful they are
Please tell me someone remembers Google wave and the insane amount people were paying on eBay for an invitation.
(Sorry, just randomly remember it when I saw Google+)
Google killed the only thing about Google that I had any sort of true feelings for. It was exactly what I wanted in a feed reader. It almost killed my affinity to read the news during my commutes.
It was the same year that The Onion stopped printing paper copies, too.
It was also the year The Hangover 3 was released at the request of nobody, but I digress.
Hopefully more content and more simplicity. I haven't experienced much of either yet. There's tons of threads about how great Lenny is but I'm just not seeing it yet ¯\(ツ)/¯
I may have a user bias, but I think KBin is already started down that path, of actually making a usuable platform for both communities and users. Unlike say Lemmy that doesn't even really let you follow individual users, and Mastodon, which lets you follow Lemmy Communities, but its hard to follow threads because every post just looks like a Re-Toot by the community "user"
Then again Friendica is pretty nice too, it treats Lemmy communities just as if they are Friendica Forums, and it supports other platforms in addition to ActivityPub, including Diaspora*, and allows for integration with Email, Calendar, etc. with several very different "themes" to choose from, with the default, Firo(?), being a UI ver similar to the world's most popular social media platform, Facebook.
Lemmy really needs to add the ability to interact with the rest of the fediverse like mastodon. That’s like…supposed to be the whole point of being part of the fediverse.
I tried using Friendica as my main Fediverse hub. Unfortunately it still has big issues regarding the handling of large lists of users (I, for one, follow around 1000 Mastodon users plus about 300 Lemmy/Kbin communities), so with much pain in my heart I had to return to dual-wielding Akkoma + Lemmy.
The good thing about Free Software is you are never at the mercy of a single provider. If you and your friends like Lemmy, you can always use lemmy. The amount of content might not be what it once was, but you are welcome to use and change, or pay someone else to let you use/change, the service forever. (Like pump.io used to be the whole #Fediverse and now identi.ca is little more than a internet graveyard save me 4 bots, and six people that cross post to Mastodon, but even it may come back now that /u/@evan indicated he's adding ActivityPub to it now that its all the rage.
Google+ was so weird, for a considerable amount of time it was invite only, you needed some form of connection to get in – turns out this wasn't great as they assumed it would be. I can only assume that is the reason they pulled a massive U-turn and decided to foist it upon anyone and everyone after the fact, which, it would appear, was also a bad idea.
It had some cool features, like how you could group/rank who you were following. It was just missing users
I think the best allegory I saw was someone trying to get into an exclusive club with a really long line. They finally get in and the place is empty so it sucks
I'm wondering if Bluesky is doing the same thing to itself
Google+ was the home of the online TableTop RPG scene out of whatever reason. We used hangouts for videochats back in the day, because you could directly stream them to YT, which was also favoured by the RPG Streamers at the time. It was wild, Google Hangouts frames were hot shit to portray your character stats and stuff. I really miss those times...
If I recall, they've just finished up a round of seed funding. I've heard precious little about the project itself, though. You may be on to something.
If it's anything like what "All" shows me, it will be mostly furries, sissies, anime, and 196 with just a splash of conservative. Unless you block it, Lemmy got some weird shit yo.
Ha I am actually still friends with people I met on G+ as well. Before Pokémon Go Niantic had a game called Ingress and we organized teams and strategized on Google+ groups and chat. I don’t know how google messed it up honestly with the way everyone with gmail had an account…you could chat and there was audio and video calling that worked pretty well. It was also very clean and modern for the time. Oh well, Alphabet.
G+ was just one of many. APIs come and go with maps, spreadsheets, forms, fusion tables. Played with some custom map places which were actually useful. after G dropped support for large chunks of code I dropped the idea. Lemmy will stay basically same. Internet will move to texted voicemail recordings with bad transcriptions.
Honestly I am just going off of my preconceptions on this golang presumption. I tend to bet often that a rust or go based product is going to win out in most cases.