Last night I pulled the plug on my #MeWe account. I opened it back when #GooglePlus folded and I needed somewhere else to go.

I know how people feel about Google but I loved Google Plus - its really nice layout, the concept of circles, a wonderful group of people I interacted with...

We tried to replicate that on MeWe, but it failed. It quickly became obvious that the network is also a magnet for conspiracy theorists and alt-right. I held on for as long as I could, but - game over

@nn1ng Endlich sagt es mal einer. #GooglePlus

And so it seems that Threads is, in fact, losing active users day by day. No surprise there. First, they announced a massive user growth (anyone with an Instagram account can sign up with a click). At first, even Europeans managed to sign up by downloading the apk, but then they locked everything down. In the end, it became just another social platform we've seen before, just like many others, from the same old company that keeps changing its look but remains the same, with no particularly notable innovations. Many have returned (or stayed) on Twitter... uh, I mean X.
Google+, in its time, brought some substantial novelties. Threads, not so much.

Patient and conscious users (especially those who experienced the dawn of the social media era) have started to also/move to specific Mastodon instances.

All in all, Musk's arrival had the same effect as breaking a bottle: shards scatter everywhere, and there's no way to put them back together.

#Threads #SocialMedia #Instagram #X #BirdSite #Facebook #Meta #Twitter #Mastodon #Innovation #GooglePlus #MuskEffect #Change #Google #Google+

La red social qué use y use mucho y me gustaba, donde conocí gente y llegamos crear una comunidad, Incluso llegué a conocer a algunos en sus países, hablo de G+ #GooglePlus. Igual fue porque coincidio mi edad y la época y el boom de la redes o su segundo boom. Ahora puede qué el #fediverso resulte lo mismo para otra generación.

04,08.2012

Erstes Usertreffen in den Räumen von Google in Hamburg.

#googleplus

A couple years after Schmidt's anti-privacy manifesto, Google launched #GooglePlus, a social network where everyone was required to use their "real name."

This decision - justified as a means of ensuring civility and a transparent ruse to improve ad targeting - kicked off the #NymWars:

https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

12/

Sogenannte Experten sagen #Threads eine große Zukunft voraus, weil das soziale Netzwerk auf Kontakte von #Instagram zurückgegreift, #googleplus wurde damals auch dieser Vorteil zugesprochen, doch dieses Netzwerk gibt es nicht mehr.

@Warbird @ErikJonker
#GooglePlus was great for what it was at the time.

I really liked that even though I only had one account, I had all these ways to talk to all these different people separately with that account. Like, I could talk about work things with my work colleagues, then put things up about music or art or whatever and most of them wouldn't see it.

It was the killer feature that made it way better than Facebook, on top of the integration into the existing Google stack, and I can't think of any other social network that had anything quite like that ever. The closest thing I've used is Mastodon, with the ability to have accounts on multiple servers.

...but they never properly launched it, so most people weren't aware it existed, and they ended up dumping it without ever really giving it a chance to take off.

So like, is #BlueSky a real site? I keep hearing about it, but I've been on the wait list for months, The feed is private so I have no idea what's going on there, and I've never even seen a screen cap of that interface...

Is anything actually like happening there? Does anyone actually like go there? Is it even active?

From what I can tell, 90% of the people who are going to Twitter alternatives are coming here to Mastodon. BlueSky, being invite only, hasn't even been able to achieve any sort of momentum...

Does anyone else remember #GooglePlus? That thing Google made that was way better than #Facebook, but they never actually released it, so people set up accounts on invites that just ended up being mostly unused?

I feel like #JackDorsey, like most #TechBros, isn't paying attention to history, and doesn't get that you need to hit hard and fast with these, and get as many switches as possible while there's hype, like #Threads (the spyware app) at least seems to be attempting...

I used to post stuff like this on #GooglePlus with #StuffIFindWalkingMyDog

You know what? It’s an unpopular opinion but the only tolerable social network that existed was Google+. I loved the circles feature where you could have a circle for family and IRL friends, a circle for video games, a circle for music etc and they were separate. I even liked when they linked Google+ to YouTube, it made comment sections a bit nicer. I miss #GooglePlus

I miss #googleplus so much. I can't help but wonder if it would have been able to take advantage of the current situation in social media if Google had not killed it.

The fediverse kinda reminds me of my experience with Google+. No algorithm, no ads, and surprisingly big G rarely intervened if at all. You had groups that people associated themselves with, and despite an outsider's outlook on it the place was surprisingly active once you got into it.

One difference though is that Fedi gives a lot more power to community managers. Google+ had some unsavory people and a bot issue (a huge one).

#googleplus #Fediverse

Intéressant ce texte de @usbeketrica qui fait en 2023 une sorte de post-mortem sur Google+, le réseau social "qui était trop complexe pour séduire". #GooglePlus

Ironiquement, s'il était lancé aujourd'hui, avec les connaissances actuelles des internautes, et surtout dans l'état actuel des choses, ça marcherait peut-être beaucoup mieux.

Son défaut ? Enfin, de ce que je constate. Il aura sans doute été lancé beaucoup, beaucoup trop tôt.

https://usbeketrica.com/fr/article/google-un-reseau-social-trop-complexe-pour-seduire

@theoddsock Ha ha! I think about the fact that #Meta is pulling users from #Instagram to #Threads.

Threads of course is more text based, but I already see a lot of photos there. For #Creators, how are they going to distinguish between their Insta account and Threads account?

And what kinds of metrics will they want to see on Threads to continually feed it #content?

Threads' early signups are impressive but no guarantee of future success. #GooglePlus, for comparison, had 40 mil within the first year but had 200 million barely participating users when it was shuttered.

I'm getting old. I feel that doing one social media migration every five years is my personal limit.

#GooglePlus #Twitter #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Threads

For what it's worth.
I'm enjoying #Threads and the creators are pretty active on there. Feels like the early days of #GooglePlus

The launch of Meta's #Threads app reminds me very much of the launch of #GooglePlus, which I actually quite liked. Sure, it was a walled garden, but it had brilliant privacy settings and a great way to build your own small social networks of just friends and family, while keeping each group separate. I kinda miss that, and think maybe it's worth another shot for Google.

I'm not leaving Mastodon for Threads or Bluesky though... This place is really friendly and has conversations worth reading.

It's impossible to foresee if Threads will be successful (from Meta's viewpoint) and matter in any way. Success or not will be almost a binary thing.

Certainly, Meta will advertise it in a big way - their target group are users of Twitter who want to leave, but are not very happy with Mastodon as it is now ("my friends are not here!" etc) or with BlueSky. So if the ads are good enough, it might gain momentum and a huge amount of Twitter users will switch there within a few days and "reconstruct" their old Twitter communities almost 1:1. In that case, it will become a big, important service very quickly.

But this completely depends on how the mass of Twitter users will act. It is just as likely that they will be skeptical and only a smaller amount of people will switch. In that case, it won't matter in the long term, and at some point, Meta will end that experiment.

(That second possibility is what happened with Google+, if you remember that at all - it aimed at becoming a big Facebook alternative and copied the design and functions of the decentral social network Diaspora, but not enough people used it. Google kept it going for a while and then ended the service after a few years, and a part of the Google+ community switched to Diaspora, because it was quite similar to use.)

#Threads #Meta #Twitter #GooglePlus #Facebook

Echo de menos #GooglePlus. Hale; ya lo he dicho. :ablobscream: