+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Academia, SchmacademiaSo there is that as well.
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitSpectacular thread. Let us recall some Brexit promises. “There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside.” (David Davis, 10 October 2016) “Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards.” (John Redwood, July 17 2016) “The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history.” (Liam Fox, 20 July 2017) “We're not really interested in a transition deal, but we'll consider one to be kind to the EU.” (David Davis, 15 November 2016) “I believe that we can get a free trade and customs agreement concluded before March 2019.” (David Davis, 18 January 2017) “Indeed, [a trade deal] would take significantly less than two years. We hold all the cards. We will offer them a deal in response to their pleas for help.” (Patrick Minford, 14 June 2016) “I am not worried about transitional arrangements. I am prepared to take the economic hit to secure the economic benefits of not being inside the Single Market and being outside the Customs Union. I simply want... a quickie divorce.” (Michael Gove, 17 November 2016) “We are going to get a deal which is of huge value and possibly of greater value.” (Boris Johnson, 16 November 2016) “Within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU. The new trade agreements will come into force at the point of exit, but they will be fully negotiated.” (David Davis, 14 July 2016) “Trade relations with the EU could be sorted out in an afternoon over a cup of coffee.” (Gerard Batten, 17 February 2017) “Within minutes of a vote for Brexit, CEOs would be knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding access to the British market.” (David Davis, 4 February 2016) “The cost of getting out would be virtually nil and the cost of staying in would be very high.” (Boris Johnson, 6 March 2016) “I think we could very easily get a better trade deal than we have at the moment.” (Douglas Carswell, 8 June 2016) “All David Davis needs to say to is: listen guys free trade or WTO?” (Tim Martin, 2 January 2017) "It will be easy to negotiate a trade deal. It's in the EU's interests." (Paul Nutall, 17 January 2017) "Nobody ever pretended this would be simple or easy." (David Davis, 5 September 2017) “If we need to leave with no deal and negotiate a free trade agreement during the transition period, so be it.” (David Davis, last week) And then there are some fantastic nuggets from the Twitter comments: "Absolutely nobody is talking about threating our place in the Single Market." (Dan Hannan, Vote Leave) "To me, Brexit is easy." (Nigel Farage, July 2017) "Only a madman would leave the Market." (Owen Paterson, Vote Leave) “Not a single job will be lost because of Brexit, not one.” (Lord Digby Jones) "Brexit will be titanic success." (Boris Johnson) "I've been to Dublin, does that count?" (Dominic Raab, when being asked if he has been to the Irish border.) "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way." (Nigel Farage, 16 May 2016) "The first calling point of the UK's negotiator immediately after Brexit will not be Brexit, it will be Berlin, to strike a deal." (David Davis, 26 May 2016) "A bespoke free trade deal that includes zero tariffs on services is in out mutual interest”. (David Davis, 7 March 2018)
+1'd post by Friends+MeHi Everyone, We've just released Google+ Exporter, an application that helps you to export your Google+ feeds (profile, pages, collections, communities, including all comments) to Wordpress eXtended RSS file. Another available option is to export all posts published to profile, pages, collections, and communities to JSON file, including all comments! Transform exported JSON data can into imports for other services, or you can use JSON export as a full generic backup of your posts. The free version of the application enables you to export up to 3000 posts. You can buy a license key to get unlimited experience. I would love to know your opinion, suggestions or requests. Thank you! You can find more detailed info in the blog post https://blog.friendsplus.me/export-google-plus-feeds-45926c925891 UPDATE: release 1.0.5: Downloadable from https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jkaut9054xzwd1e/AAAkXT7j7I8qi7ryMJqBx0oxa?dl=0&lst= What's new: * fixed posts comments download. We recommend re-downloading all feeds to fetch missing comments. * fixed message compilation for WP export * WP export now with comments * export collections and communities separately * configurable exports, pick whether you want to export private posts and comments #GooglePlusRefugees #GooglePlus #Google+ #DataLiberation #DataExport
+1'd post by Edward Morbius in Plussology & Plexology: Google MetaEl día de los Muertos That's your American holiday, no? https://gcemetery.co
+1'd post by Edward Morbius in PLExodusThe offer stands
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitThese meetings with Rees-Mogg are getting more dramatic by the day.
+1'd post by Joerg FliegeIn the US, an adult on average spends two hours and 51 minutes on their smartphone every day. That is eight minutes longer than Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.
+1'd post by Edward Morbius in PLExodus: The Beginning is NearGoogle Plus Archiver: gplus-archiver This is a PHP-based tool which queries the G+ API and can archive entire communities as JSON files, created by +Spencer Salyer. There is a 10,000 query/day limit imposed by Google on Google+ activity and you can cut through that quickly. I've not tested this, looking for folks who can/will. There's a set of archived communities as an example at: https://wispsoftime.com/gplus-archiver/ His notes follow: It is PHP code to query the G+ API with the community ID and loop through all the posts and comments, storing them as json files (one per post). It can eat through their 10k query/day limit quickly depending on the community, so I disabled the form on the live site. I'd be happy to take requests for archival, though. It should be every post and associated comments in each community, with info for photos and attachments, etc. I'm not actually downloading attachments, so much of that is still hosted at Google. It's still a bit of a work in progress, but I thought it better to download what I could as soon as I could. The code is here, if it's helpful: https://github.com/sdsalyer/gplus-archiver
+1'd post by John Lewis in Google+ HelpHello Google+ Help Community. My name is John Lewis and shortly after the bullet point announcing the closure of Google+ was released I started a community to help users manage migration to other Social Media sources. I named it Google Mass Migration and it's here: https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772 I was immediately contacted by the media. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/10/google-plus-users-mourn-shutdown.html Originally my plan was to only include thought leaders and have a small community, but that plan did not account for the amount of grief that users were experiencing. It quickly became obvious that users needed a lot of hand-holding to navigate the five stages of loss [denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance]. We have over 3000 users and we continue to grow. I suspect just this post will bring hundreds more. We have created forms and directories for users to locate each other after the closure, created tutorials for using Google Takeout services, researched bugs in that same service, and provided comparisons of other online social media options. This just scratches the surface of what these amazing community users have done to self-help each other. I am not aware of any +Google+ members who joined the community. If they are there, they are silent. I had hoped this meant there was a plan being worked on to help current users, but as time continues to move on, I have less hope. People have already migrated off Google+. I've come here to present a simple alternative. If you want a stronger connection to your users and you want to help them make their way to safe harbors on the internet, please consider participating. Failing that, perhaps a section here on how to use Google Takeout to help save what has been created on this remarkable social network. The enemy here is confusion, misinformation, and delay. I'm offering a hand to you to help demystify this process for your users. If you do not wish to reply in a comment, you can contact me directly by email. Kindest Regards, John Lewis
+1'd post by Edward Morbius in Google+ Mass MigrationAny Google+ Help mods or members in G+MM We're trying to reach out to both the Google+ Help community and moderators with limited success to date. If you'd be willing to make the case for G+ Help working with rather than against Google+ Mass Migration, we'd appreciate it. Thanks.
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitSince the Brexit referendum, West Hertfordshire Hospital Trust has lost 321 members of staff. All of them happen to be EU non-UK nationals. A couple of takes on the matter: 1) Surely a coincidence, right? 2) This will increase wages for healthcare workers. [Hahahahaaaaa] 3) Just hire Dave from the pub as a replacement. He is a graduate from the school of hard knocks, so he knows his way around. 4) On a more serious note, the whole Brexit crisis exposes one of the other weaknesses of the UK social model. It is one thing to hire the best and the brightest from abroad for specialist roles, and an entirely other thing to be dependant on other states to provide you with nurses, teachers, plumbers, scientists, doctors and other specialists.
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitJo Johnson has resigned as a transport minister, saying the country is "barrelling towards an incoherent Brexit" and calling for another referendum. The Orpington MP said that "given that the reality of Brexit has turned out to be so far from what was once promised, the democratic thing to do is to give the public the final say". Mr Johnson added his brother Boris, the chief Brexit campaigner and former foreign secretary, is "as unhappy with the government's proposals as I am". Can't complain about this Brexit TV series. Each time you think it gets a bit boring the writers throw in something from the left field.
+1'd post by wcangel in Google+ AspireGoogle Plus Migration: The Journey Does Not End Here Notes from different people. Major resources and go to G+ communities. Gandalf - The journey does not end here... (HD) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rag_9J1ZC2g "The journey does not end here." Death is just another path, one that we all must take." I am, as you all know, the main free society organizer on this social platform and also the main Buddhist teacher. My work here will continue for another seven months. It is not possible to do this kind of outreach on any other social platform due to several reasons. It is very possible that many people will choose to migrate their online social networking from Google plus to a set of platforms rather than just one platform. I expect to move most of my social content and public service work to places like MeWe, reddit, and Pinterest. This new set of tools is a far weaker set of capabilities and resources than the Google Plus platform presently offers, particularly for what I do. Obviously, no real work can be done on either Fascistbook or Twitter. Fascistbook is spyware and pure evil. The loss of G+ is catastrophic for global communication. If Google were to defer their platform shutdown for another six months that would be of enormous benefit to many, but there is no reason to expect that to happen. To do global communication several fundamental characteristics are necessary. One of these is multiple language support. In particular, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and western languages must be supported for any social platform to be a global platform. MeWe may be a good platform for English language users, but it does not presently support Chinese or Hindi. G+ supports Thai and Sinhalese and Chinese, which makes possible engagement with Asian and Asian Buddhist communities. I can hope that someone at MeWe is smart enough to do the right thing and set up good language support ( Chinese and Hindi ) in the next six months but I have no reason to expect this obvious and crucial step will be taken by then. A second critical necessity is free speech. MeWe maintains that as a primary principle but Fascistbook is a primary enemy of free speech, as are some other platforms and platform services. One medium size group ( N ~60K) is foolishly moving to Fascistbook so I told them why this is disastrous and why no intelligent or sane person would go there with them. In a few months I kiss them goodbye and that is their loss. An alternative approach for major content providers is to generate a stream that propagates to different distributaries, such as a dedicated blog, Fascistbook and others at the same time. This works but it does not support community engagement, just content distribution. Here are some resources and technical perspectives. Good fortune to us all, muggles and wizzies alike. The Traveling Wilburys - End Of The Line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMVjToYOjbM ======================= Established G+ Exodus Communities https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Established_G%2B_Exodus_Communities#Reddit On platforms supporting hashtags, broadcasting or following the following should turn up other Google+ refugees: #googleplus #gplusrefugees #gplusrefugee #gplusexodus The Pluspora pod is operated and principally populated by Google+ refugees. As of 13 October 2018, http://pluspora.com - increased membership from perhaps 100 before the G+ termination announcement (October 8) to 5500 within a few days. Reddit There are several Google+ and specifically Google+ Refugee subreddits. /r/GooglePlus is a general-interest Google Plus forum not specifically oriented at refugees. Moderators have not responded to inquiries from Dredmorbius (/u/dredmorbius at Reddit). 6,681 subscribers as of 19 October 2018. /r/GooglePlusRefugees is a general-discussion forum. 174 subscribers as of 19 October 2018. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page This wiki serves the population of present and former Google+ users seeking to continue their community across future platform(s). The goal of this Wiki is to gather and consolidate information: Facilitating individual and group migrations. In one place. That can be collaboratively edited. Out-of-band of G+ itself, or any one other destination platform About alternatives, risks, concerns, opportunities, hopes, fears. ============================== https://mewe.com/join/google_plus_refuge Google+ Mass Migration https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772 The Beginning is Near https://plus.google.com/communities/107813327011154265528 ============================== What is the difference between friendica and hubzilla? https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/2894 Friendica is at heart and primarily implements a "federated decentralised social network". It is a social network which aggregates other social networks as well as providing its own protocol and social service. what is the difference between friendica and hubzilla? The more easy question would be, what do they have in common ;-) For me, Hubzilla is decentral publishing of all kinds of things with a fine rights management. And Friendica is decentral social networking with a fine management of who you socialize with and connections to many other social networks. Publishing of things includes some social networking though, as does social networking include some publishing. And I know that the scope of this comparison is far to limited to grasp the complexity of the question asked. ============================== Let's say that you decided to split your G+ activity into separate activities living in different digital environments. Perhaps you'll blog at site X and chat through app Y and keep up with current events and trends on platform Z. What would your categories be and which solutions would you currently favor for each? (I'm shamelessly hoping to steal your answers.) Edward Morbius Owner +8 This roughly describes my planned strategy. 1. Write, blog, research, organise, and Wiki: GitLab. My source content is in my control, under Git, on my own desktop, in backups, and at any other hosts I syndicate that to. 2. Direct syndication through RSS/Atom. 3. Propogation through microblogging platform(s). Mastodon certainly. I may even set up a Twitter account. I'm considering the username "Registered under protest" preliminarily.... (There's already a "dredmorbius", it's not me.) 4. Further propogation through social / lightweight blogging networks. Diaspora, Fediverse, Hubzilla, Friendica, etc. Most of 3 & 4 would be automated. 5. Interaction and engagement on a personal basis (largely replacing G+) through one of the federated social networks. If I can have a central management hub for those (and I've run across a platform that seems to offer that on a web-based basis, though I'd prefer a local desktop or commandline option), so much the better. The faster I can slice through mentions, comments, etc. the better. One thing I've ... somewhat ... liked about G+ is that on desktop it's modestly possible to address interactions directly through the Notifications pane. Considering Notifications as its own stream and giving a way to rapidly: a) See events. b) Filter by type. c) Respond immedately from the Notifications context (screen, pane, pop-up, whatevs, though I prefer a page rather than overlay). d) Expand context in the Notifications context as needed for more complex stuff. e) Dismiss immediately events of no interest. (With an undo for fumbling finger factor.) f) Where any administrative factors are presented, say, group management or moderator actions -- approving, banning, admonishing, etc., users or content -- those controls are also presented directly in the Notifications context. (The lack of this is a major frustration on Reddit. It's pathologically bad for G+ Communities, do not even get me started.) I think that's a big chunk of it. A lightweight Notifs management as a secondary option could also be useful. A gripe with Diaspora is that dealing with Notifs is slow. It's only a few seconds' lag, but that's seconds that don't have to be there. A <300ms target would be ideal. I'm getting ~3s, which is 10x worse, and which repeated 33 times (present notifs count) is three minutes spent just waiting for things to happen while I'm responding to Notifications. And in cases that bumps up 2-3x slower, or worse. Nine minutes of wait. And 33 notifs is light traffic, at least right now. The models I'm thinking of are G+, Diaspora, Ello (which has had several variations of Notifications, and created then reverted the best I've ever seen, sort of a side-pane, Usenet reader (think Netscape's Usenet client, or rtin), Reddit, and Hacker News (great on everything except context, though limited to replies only). Mutt (console email client) is among the best interfaces I've ever seen, and some sort of local social-to-email gateway might address a few concerns / considerations. Speaking of email and Usenet: among many factors which killed them (and there were many -- I've got a "what killed Usenet" post at the Dreddit https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius) was the fact that there was no standardisation of composing conventions. You had a few schools of this, but they interacted poorly: 1. Top vs. bottom posting. Largely a Unix / Windows split. 2. Indication of emphasis, with the underscore/star style in plain text (similar to AsciiDoc). Markdown actually breaks a few of these conventions but is ubiquitous enough to be useful. 3. HTML vs. raw text. 4. Line length. Still matters for some. 5. Attachments. 6. Other rich-text formats. Among the fundamental failures was a failure to come to a common agreement on interactions. I had a revelation when reading about Docker, a lightweight virtualisation system. The technology consists solely of an agreement on how to do things. All the pieces were already there. Protocols and standardisation, like trust, are social glue. They can also create problems. Protocols that become change-resistant stagnate development. There are examples of this and the communications and information fields are rife with these because standards and conventions of exchange are the essence of communications. Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit's "Glory" are the antithesis of communication -- if you use symbols known only to yourself, you can communicate with no one. (Groups, though, using conventions known only internally, create the capacity to operate independently of an outside environment. This is a tool, for good or bad. See RibbonFarm's essay on "legibility vs. illegibility.) SMTP, NNTP, IRC, SMS, HTML, nroff/groff, DocBook, Markdown, LaTeX (an extension of TeX), proprietary office formats (consider in context of above parenthetical note), RSS, Atom, XHTML, HTML5, the Federation / Fediverse protocols, Mastodon, diff formats, revision control formats, git, SSH, PGP, MIME, TCP/IP, Slack. They're all (at least in part) protocols, some open, some closed, some dynamic and developing, some static, some interacting, some not, some encapsulating, some encapsulated. (Programming languages and various other bits overlap with this in various ways.) Ok, that's enough for this morning's ramble.
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitWhat have Sarah Wollaston (Tory), Paul Williams (Tory), and Philippa Whitford (SNP) in common? They are all doctors, they all sit in parliament, and together they are trying to forge a cross-party group that will try to pass an amendment to Theresa May's vote on her Brexit deal. This amendment 'will state that acceptance of the prime minister’s deal must be dependent on a public vote taking place beforehand, in which people would be offered the choice of leaving on the terms of that deal, or staying in the EU.' Apparently, they are trying to build bridges based on the common concern for the NHS. Smart doctors, you might say. They reckon they have the backing of about 100 MPs. All eyes on Corbyn now. Will he allow his MPs to vote for this amendment? He himself is presently in favour of a different strategy: let May's deal fall through and force a general election first. Which is not what the majority of party members wants, apparently.
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitThis does not bode well. Khan [the counter-extremism commissioner], appointed by Theresa May in the wake of the Manchester Arena attack, told the Observer: “I was really shocked that in every place I visited I heard deep concerns about the activity and impact of the far right. “Councils across the country raised the impact the far-right demonstrations have on whole towns, exploiting tensions and stoking division. I repeatedly heard about a climate of intolerance and polarisation.” One youth worker from the south of England told Khan of his fears that a “whole generation of vulnerable children” could be lost to the far right. Elsewhere, a local education group said it had seen increasing numbers of children making racist and extremist statements in schools. [...] “This backs up what experts have been telling me – that we are seeing a new wave of the far right: modernised, professionalised and growing; supported by a frightening amount of legal online extremist material.” Rowley [counter-terrorism officer of the Met, ret.] warned the public and politicians not to underestimate the situation, describing how National Action, a proscribed neo-Nazi organisation, has “a strategy for a terrorist group” with online information on how to create discord in communities and evade police surveillance.
+1'd post by Jack Samuel in Google+ HelpI've been using Google blogger for a few weeks now and I find it to be an acceptable alternative to Google+ collections. Actually in terms of page view/traffic information I find it to be more useful than collections. And people can subscribe to my blog posts with feed readers or by email. But I'm wondering how safe the Google Blogger platform is from Google deciding to pull the plug on that too? Any thoughts about this? I considered using Word Press for my blog but I like the simplicity of Google Blogger.
+1'd post by Joerg Fliege in Brexit, SchmexitAlso seen yesterday, in London.
