Wanderlust

To address the elephant: Google has announced that it is discontinuing G+ for consumers as of the end of August 2019.

To address the elephant: Google has announced that it is discontinuing G+ for consumers as of the end of August 2019. The last time I calculated a projected end date for this blog project, it predicted five more years(!) to get as far as the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in February 2023. We started in June 2013.

I am open to anyone’s thoughts about this, particularly those of Randi Cohen. We have an archive of about 400 episode reviews, not counting the films and fan films, which I would like to preserve. I’m also not keen on being told when to quit by others.

My immediate inclination is to press on to the end of the current seasons, which we should reach by the end of the year or early January 2019. At that point it would seem we need to migrate to a new platform.

My preference would be a setup that allows easy navigation between current and archived episode blog posts, perhaps similar to http://www.theviewscreen.com/, rather than, e.g., just dumping posts into the maw of a Facebook group, to be mashed up according to Facebook’s algorithms. This, frankly, sounds like a lot of work to establish, let alone to accomplish the data migration. On the bright side, breaking free from Google Plus could open up new promotion opportunities and opportunities to bring in new commentators and discussion partners.

If we do go with something like a custom-built WordPress site, I may consider hiring someone to design it and work on data migration. Is WordPress the best platform? Google says “over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data,” but I don’t want to count on that. Any and all advice is welcome!

https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-strobe/

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15 responses to “To address the elephant: Google has announced that it is discontinuing G+ for consumers as of the end of August 2019.”

  1. Paul Brauner Avatar
    Paul Brauner

    Google takeout gives you all your posts as both html and Json (haven’t tried it yet) so you could start the migration now without waiting for the promised tools if you’d want to.

    Reply
  2. Paul Brauner Avatar
    Paul Brauner

    WordPress or medium sound good to me. I’d rather avoid Facebook. Anything with an rss feed would be great.

    Reply
  3. Randi Cohen Avatar
    Randi Cohen

    I simply do not know enough to offer thoughts on which platform to use. I notice that wordpress charges 4 dollars per month to remove their advertising, which i would happily split with you, Kev, if their ads are annoying.

    I would also happily split the cost of someone to port the content over, if it were reasonable. Perhaps that person could make a suggestion about platform as well.

    Reply
  4. Blair Jones Avatar
    Blair Jones

    I don’t do Facebook, it creeps me out. Lots of other people don’t do FB either. I don’t know if various ST communities migrating over there (if they aren’t already doing a FB group) would be enough to make them drink that drek.

    Reply
  5. Kevin Black Avatar
    Kevin Black

    I subscribe to a huge Star Trek community on Facebook (107,015 members), and it is a bunch of memes and basic questions that devolve into repetitive fights over which series is best and whether or not people like Discovery. There are no navigation tools. I’m not sure about moderation controls… but I’m thinking it’s not a good match. There could be a Facebook group to promote a standalone website, though, and funnel traffic towards it.

    Reply
  6. Kevin Black Avatar
    Kevin Black

    The tough part about migrating data is not just preserving the content of the posts, but preserving the content of the comments. Nearly all of Randi Cohen’s contributions reside in comments, and I think the discussion is the best part, especially when we were tackling the Original Series.

    Reply
  7. Kevin Black Avatar
    Kevin Black

    I already maintain a copy of my original episode comments in a set of word processing files in cloud storage.

    Reply
  8. Paul Brauner Avatar
    Paul Brauner

    I hope that google takeout data also contains the comments.

    Reply
  9. Randi Cohen Avatar
    Randi Cohen

    Me too!

    Reply
  10. Paul Brauner Avatar
    Paul Brauner

    I just checked, it does contain the comments. It’s JSON (machine-readable format) so it could be easily imported into another tool/platform with a few lines of code. I bet there are already or will be tools that do it.

    Reply
  11. Randi Cohen Avatar
    Randi Cohen

    Thank you, Paul!!!!

    Reply
  12. Kevin Black Avatar
    Kevin Black

    Probably need to test this and see what the output looks like!

    There’s a lingering issue of how much I will insist on having it just the way I envision it, and to what extent whatever the tool comes up with will be good enough. Someone good at coding could probably customize to my specifications!

    Reply
  13. Don Glover Avatar
    Don Glover

    groups.io – Transfer Your Group To Groups.io

    Reply
  14. Don Glover Avatar
    Don Glover

    Don Glover Don’t know if will help, but it is worth looking into.

    Reply
  15. Kevin Black Avatar
    Kevin Black

    This looks like it’s for google groups, which I think is different from a community on G+. Clearly I need to do some poking around, however.

    Reply

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