I'm glad I read the article, the dripping irony and mockery in the title for some reason didn't trigger for me until I actually started reading. The idea that someone who considered Google Plus the "next big thing" has any ability to predict the success or failure of social media platforms is indeed pretty comical.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 26 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is probably controversial, but Google Plus was better than Facebook in every way.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 days ago

Not that high of a bar, but I agree

[–] Jeffool@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I joined Google Plus with a group of a couple dozen friends from a long-time online community, and many of us loved it! As i recall the biggest issue at launch was that you couldn't push a pay to a circle and still leave it discoverable on your timeline, without pushing it to everyone. That kinda made it more insular than it should've been. Slowly we all stopped because no one else (family, friends,) was joining.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, same. I tried getting people to switch, but it was like pulling teeth. It's even worse now, even with all the Meta Zuckerberg Trump bullshit and the obvious privacy problems.

The circles feature was awesome. Could post stuff for specific groups of people. Sometimes your posts aren't for all your friends to see.

At first Diaspora seemed to propose a good alternative to Facebook ang G+. It has "aspects" which work similarly to circles. And the interface is similar to Facebook's. However, it didn't take off as much as anyone would've expected.

Now there's also Friendica which closely resembles Facebook, but it appears limited in functionality. It looks more like a Facebook-UI to the fediverse, like Mastodon is a Twitter-UI to the fediverse. ~~It's missing the whole "circles/aspects" feature~~, and we still don't have the groups feature either, which I think is very useful and much appreciated by Facebook users.

EDIT: Actually I just double checked and it does have circles actually.

[–] kudra@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm hoping to start a Friendica instance, it's been around for a long time and actually has events, which is something NO other social network has managed to add and one of the main reasons people I know who don't like Facebook will feel compelled to use it, there's no other easy way to create and invite people to events.

I also tried to get people to try G+, before that Diaspora, and neither got many people interested: but I think Fedi has now proved its not going away. There needs to be sustained local push to relocalise communities, this is happening in a few places, and enough nontechy people are starting to really understand the danger of FB and the silo mentality.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Oh that's interesting, I didn't know it had events,