#GoodbyePlus

It seems like a decade ago that I switched social media platforms to Google Plus (G+). It was really more like 8.5 years since I abandoned Facebook. It had a long list of security problems, even back in those days, and that's entirely separate from their privacy issues. I didn't get into the earliest phases of G+, but I made the leap to it as soon as I was able. I was early enough that I was able to secure a vanity url with my name on it instead of the usual userid number.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TerryWalker
https://plus.google.com/u/0/110454253627715621789

I really liked the science/education crowd that established itself on the new platform. I could easily entertain myself by following posts to new people and groups and topics. Some early MOOCs (massive open online courses) started there too.

Unfortunately, Google never really put the effort into developing the platform that they should have. After all these years, I still have people included in "Circles" where I first placed them, all because there is no easy way to mass-migrate people from one tag to another. I always imagined a webpage with two vertical halves where you select a circle on one side, a circle on the other side, then you can multi-click to drag accounts from one to the other. It never happened.

Today, finally, Google is ending its platform for public users. They shut down different features over time during the last few weeks/months, so most people have already jumped to other platforms.

Similarly, I'm slowly extricating myself from Google services. I'm still using Google Drive for some backups, and I still have a Google Mail account for authentication purposes. But it's clear that their "Don't Be Evil" philosophy is long gone (available now only via archive backups). Amongst their problems is their frequent closure of services that some people rely upon. It's so bad that some people even try to analyze their behavior to predict future closures.

As one person puts it:

“Nothing has done nearly so much as Google+ to kill trust in Google itself, from its management, staffing, projects, products, and general capabilities standpoints,” says one of the moderators of the migration community, a self-described “old-school ‘Netter” who goes by the online pseudonym Dr. Edward Morbius. “I’d once admired the company. I now treat it with strong distrust.”
- https://medium.com/s/love-hate/the-death-of-google-is-tearing-its-diehard-communities-apart-ad8332f4200d

Those parting words are polite. Some people are much more crude about it.  Some people make a funny response. 

So we're shutting down G+. We'll be shutting it down this coming August April as soon as we can locate the Google+ SRE in charge. We've been trying to page them for months but they're not answering. We're pretty sure that there's a G+ control dashboard in our systems somewhere -- when we find it we'll pull the switch and you'll all be history.
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bdVZi8HpPtj4n633mc1YDs-4UsxklCNmIyjxKvN4Kmc/edit

I'm moving over to the OpenBook.social platform. It's currently in alpha testing for those people who crowdfunded donations to get the project moving.  It has occasional database problems and rollbacks, but it looks extremely promising. Finally, an open-source social platform with security as a focus.  One alpha tester asked on Slack how OpenBook displays the number of "likes" a post gets, if it's a very large number of likes.  Someone else replied with this link to the programming code that displays the result.  Cheers for open source projects!

I'm also likely to use this Dreamwidth platform much more.



Today, though, is just a farewell to G+. It could've been so much more.