@tk I liked and was excited about #GPlus when it first came out ( because after all, it was mostly just a #Diaspora clone ). But then came the nymwars and trying to force it down people's throats. And mingling GPlus contacts with my Android contacts ... which was the final straw for me.
@dansup Talk to #Friendica devs. If Circles are meant to approximate #GPlus Circles and #Diaspora Aspects, they (and #Hubzilla's Mike) probably have more insight than everyone else.
@murph Yes, I was an active user of #Diaspora and its "Aspects" when #GPlus and its "Circles" came out, so it was very familiar. Both the concept and the site's initial interface were obvious clones of D*.
@dansup At least at the beginning, they were a clone of #Diaspora's Aspects. That and everything else about #GPlus was so similar that I immediately felt comfortable. ( Until #nymwars and forced joining proved they weren't going to eventually federate. )
Occasional reminder that "followers-only" is only rarely what you want.
What you usually want is a defined subset of your contacts that a post will be sent to. Basically, you want #Diaspora's "Aspects," or #GPlus's "Circles".
@bob @cyberpotato @maiyannah Google did something similar once before. When #GPlus launched, it was a clone of #Diaspora, minus federation. I don't think many people left D* and clung to GPlus.
@usbhump Evan P's Status\.Net startup lost its funding. Around the same time, he was trying to get the developers of the underlying protocols that compose #OStatus to agree to make changes to their protocols to enable enhanced privacy. Among the organizations he was trying to motivate was Google, which had recently introduced #GPlus and was no long interested in the open web.
In a hurry to cut costs, he developed the #Pump.io software and protocol to be simpler to develop and cheaper to operate, and to offer some additional privacy built into the protocol. And also to be independent of the progress some of these protocols.
Pump was built with the idea that most federated networks would switch protocols to be compatible. That did not happen. But the hope is that its descendant #ActivityPub will unite the disparate networks.
@gargron Don't oversell AP. If you start to sound like a used car salesperson, people will become suspicious of your motives and the veracity of your claims.
@deadsuperhero @takeshitakenji @archaeme Somehow, I suspect that there was a time when #Twitter itself considered adding federation. It would have been between the time #Identi.ca launched and shortly after #GPlus cloned #Diaspora's UI and aspects functionality.
@bob When #GPlus first came out, the appearance and the functionality was a straight clone of #Diaspora, so lots of people joined thinking it would eventually federate. When that never happened and the nymwars started ("real name policy"), some of us left, while others stayed.
It motivated me to sever nearly all remaining ties to bigG (I also hated the way that GPlus contacts got added to my addressbook/contacts on my Android devices.)
@nds Interesting. I was thinking about setting a #MediaGoblin instance for family members to try to get them to share photos, videos, audio outside of the silos of the #Lockiverse ( #Instagram, #Facebook, #GPlus, and so on ). I'd still need to see whether media has a way to set access controls.