Lemmy is still going to be here because it’s not a Google product.
Touche…
Pour one out for project Ara, everyone… And the hundreds of other companies that had a bright future before Google bought and destroyed them.
It’s a decade later, and I’m still bitter about Google Reader’s unceremonious execution.
Gotta be Google Play Music I’m still bitter about. YouTube music doesn’t hold a candle to it, and I’ve never quite been as happy with Spotify or Apple Music. Getting YT Premium with a good music service was great too, but they shot themselves in the foot.
And there’s was just… no reason for it. They even delayed its death when they realized how crap YT Music was, and then later just… decided to do it anyways.
I was so upset about it that I almost de-Googled. And I was all-in on the Google ecosystem. In the end I begrudgingly continued on because I didn’t have the time or energy to find replacements for everything.
But yes, I’m still angry over it. I like NewsBlur, it does everything I need, but I still miss Google Reader, and I would go back to it in a second.
Google made a huge mistake shutting down Google+. If they had built it out to integrate with Youtube, where people could have a space to Tweet, have a Main Page feed like Facebook, and post videos all in the same platform, they would have dominated the market.
I still have a hard time believing that no-one has created a platform that encompasses all of those things. Meta is doing it piece-meal but it’s all disorganized. It should be one unified platform.
That’s why I hope some developers start working on a way to integrate Lemmy and Mastodon and like… PeerTube together into a single frontend. I’d love to be able to manage my Mastodon posts and BS on Lemmy in the same website.
@Shadesto @MargotRobbie AFAIK YouTube did have google plus integration but it was optional.
I don’t really get what the hate was for Google+, it was better than the alternative/competitor at the time (Facebook)
Google+ forced itself on people. I didn’t want it so I stopped using my Gmail entirely. I imagine word of mouth caused people to avoid it.
And the ridiculous part on top of that is that it was the exact opposite situation at first. When it first launched, you had to be a friend of a friend of a Google employee to register or you weren’t getting in. It took me a about a month before a friend of mine studying CompSci at university with the kid of some Google employee was able to pass an invitation my way.
I get the purpose was to generate hype by making it seem “exclusive” like Facebook was in the early days, but it took way too long before the people who genuinely wanted to use it were allowed to openly register for it. It was like that for 3 months, and a lot of people who gave up on trying to get an invite lost interest after the initial buzz died down.
And then Google wasn’t satisfied with upsetting the people that wanted to use it, so they had to go and upset the people who didn’t want to use it by later forcing it on everyone with a Google account.
It’s kind of funny, isn’t this exactly what Meta is doing to everyone with an Instagram account? You have a shadow profile on Threads regardless if you signed up or not.
I wonder why the reaction is so different, maybe because they both are social media? Or maybe just good timing with the whole Twitter debaucle.
Google wasn’t comfortable in letting it grow naturally over time. They tried really hard to push on people by combining it with other more popular google products when it didn’t really make sense (i.e. Youtube). Also, as a teen at the time google plus just felt nerdy and weird. It didn’t really feel like something they cool kids would use so no one used it.
Yeah that’s how I felt too. I remember being excited about g+, then I also remember aggressively turning off any association to g+ because no one was on it and it kept pushing it in my face. Come to think of it gmail was similar, invite only and that, but it wasn’t forced even at release and they made it look a lot nicer than what yahoo and hotmail had going on at the time.
and from what i remember, staying true to typical google fashion, they fucked it up by not opening up the “beta” when they had a critical mass forming behind it. then only to force everyone into having a profile a year or whatever later. lol, too late. i think most of us understood that anything associated with google is assumed to be a never-ending “beta”, so no idea what they were thinking or waiting for.
I think it was definitely the super long beta period where you needed an invite killed it. I knew a ton of people who were interested that gave up
That’s easy to say now, but Orkut (another Google social network, mostly used in Brazil) also had a beta invite system… And that helped it grow tremendously. The secrecy and “status” of getting invited made people go wild - they would even sell invites.
The strategy can work. It’s just very timing sensitive.
It was good but it didn’t really add enough or solve an actual problem. At the time, there wasn’t as much negative sentiment around Facebook. The circles were a neat concept but too much work to use for the average user.
It’s strange to note that if Google had just casually worked on the feature, started gradually integrating it with YouTube etc, they might have beat insta to the punch and also really capitalized on Facebook hate. Instead they made one massive marketing blunder after another.
I agree, and the level of user on G+ was of a techy IT variety of person. It was great and you could have good conversations. Lemmy really has that feel now. Enjoy it till either the general public gets hold of it and it turns into a cesspool or it slowly dies a death.
Personally I hope to face neither of those scenarios, but history is not on our side.
The concept of who you chose to share your status was cumbersome. It at least not auntie or uncle friendly
I don’t remember what it was called? Spaces?
I don’t remember what it was called? Spaces?
Circles. It was a killer feature at the time, the idea of different feeds for different groups, all in one profile. Too bad there weren’t enough groups to make it useful.
Being able to share certain posts with everyone (including your parents/grandparents) vs just your friends vs your work colleagues was a brilliant feature that seems to have just been substituted with private group chats instead. Seriously when I was a teenager the amount of stuff I thought about posting but didn’t because it would appear for everyone…
In 12 years, selfhosting will be so cheap and one-push-button easy that everyone will have their own instance and federated with each other. It will be called Neo-Geocities 2.0.
Well, not really the same thing but I saw this the other day. I think it is awesome, but that is probably only nostalgia talking. It is a geocities website for the current day!
Related tech: https://small-tech.org/
There is now Neocities.org so I’d say you’re spot on :)
This is why you should never adopt Google services, there’s a high chance they will kill it off given their awful track record.
At least they let me turn my Stadia controller into a regular Bluetooth controller ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the biggest miss Google had was with Google Wave. It was way ahead of its time, and absolutely crashed and burned at launch because of the invite-only model.
I bought a Google OnHub router, which was amazing. It was marketed as the most “future-proof” router at the time. Then Google made Google WiFi mesh routers around a year later, and OnHub was never marketed or mentioned again. Now, in addition to my already concerning privacy issues around Google services, I don’t trust that they will release quality, supported products.
I started reading your comment and thought “please be about Wave” haha. The funniest part about Wave is how they learned no lessons from it.
The invite-only model worked great for Gmail because it was an actual service with real utility and people wanted in (1GB storage was huuuuge). But with social networks, the courting ritual is reversed, because without a critical mass of users the product has no utility.
So what do they do with G+? Invite only 🤦♂️
And by then they had something like half the world running Android, with Google accounts… and didn’t just let them in. Youtube should have been a simple “if you want to check out G+, your Youtube account will get you in, otherwise carry on.” Instead they make it invite only and then bully youtubers into registering.
It’s just mind-boggling how little they understood about social networks after building such a wonderful piece of software for it.
It’s been a while since I’ve used a Chromecast, but they were always reliable.
I hate the name Lemmy, there, I said it … as much as I hated the name Google+
Yeah, I’ve been running around the Fediverse for two years now and the name has yet to grow on me. Makes it slightly difficult to explain to people who are interested. The “iverse” part makes it sound like a metaverse type project which gives some people pause -because of the hype-flop cycle and, of course, all the crypto scams associated with that. Have to begin the pitch with “but it has nothing to do with [that], so don’t worry.” (Edit because autocorrect)
They should’ve called it Google Circles. Google Plus just sounded like some kind of premium subscription to Google and not like a social network.
I really enjoyed Google+ specifically for the Circles feature. I’m pretty sure it was the age unrestricted global Hangouts chats that killed it… Probably what this scene from Silicon Valley is about.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=hjtr64ZQUWA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I don’t care about the name much, but it’s going to make searching for anything on here through a regular search engine cumbersome. Lemmy is just going to bring up results to the late motorhead singer
It’s like how Reddit is I've read it, Lemmy is Let me tell you… Think an excited person, “Lemmytellyousomething!!!”
It’ll change if it gets popular, not everything can have an ultra unique name
Yeah, I know. If Lemmy get’s big enough it’s going to be the top searches just like Reddit was. Until that time though, it’s going to be a whole lot of power stache lol.
I’m a huge motorhead fan. The name is a not insignificant part of why I chose this as a reddit alternative over the others
I just think it ultimately sounds like a lousy c-grade 3rd party app. Then again, Mastodon isn’t much better. At least Reddit is basically witty.
