Google is speeding up the demise of G+. @Brandon_Satterfield Have you and any further thoughts?
@Colin_Kaminski I had an idea and posted it to a larger group as it would take a heck of a crowd to get it moving. Once I posted the idea the entire page went silent. No one reached out after.
I’ve moved a bit over to Facebook as it was easy, but no one is really active over there regardless of having a decent member count in such a short time.
Discord will not work.
I used to have a nice forum set up but sharing pictures was an awful experience.
I’ll be honest brother, I’m mostly out of ideas.
Discourse works well for q&a type of setting. Not great for just quickly sharing content though.
I had considered Mastodon (think opensource decentralized Twitter) but their character length limit of 500chars is perhaps a little limiting. However it’s probably the closest to gplus in terms of usage though once you are over the setup hurdle.
Diaspora (opensource distributed Facebook) never seems to gain traction but I would prefer over FB.
There is also a thing called openbook in the works but that’s not yet out but aims to be a simple opensource Facebook alternative.
I find Facebook is fine for friends but its lack of searching makes topics slide off and be forgotten. I would be willing to help set up a phpBB forum. I owned one for 10 years that was very busy. 30K visits per month. Hosting cost was $100/mo. It could be done for $30/mo with lighter traffic and still have lots of room to host photos.
@Colin_Kaminski I have the space. Enough where people could load photos and models, etc. on the same server the website is on. The open source type forum is one I have considered.
The issue I have is that people in general tend to post in my areas when they need help or have issues (which is cool) but rarely show off successes or come back to help others with the exception of here, with you guys.
It’s that way with the silly Facebook one right now, I keep seeing issues in the group, awesomeness posted everywhere else. A few guys watch and help out, funny enough they are G+ guys… thank you to you guys for being awesome.
When I had the forum on SMW3D, two individuals posted helpful content. The rest was issues that only my group and I answered.
I like this idea, I just don’t want to own another help desk outlet that is not creative like this is. If we can find a way to get interaction like this place has, I’m down!
@Ben_Delarre as far as I have looked you have named two sources I was into but have named the restrictions as well. I do like big data and long post… 
Totally with you on the forum issues @Brandon_Satterfield . What usually happens in my experience is a Support forum that nobody wants to actually…support. And a General Discussion forum where everything happens. But because its a forum, they usually don’t work well on mobile, so the drive by casual support interaction we have now just doesn’t happen.
I’ve joined the Makerdon masterdon instance today to start exploring if the format works well for our type of use here. The 500 character limit is certainly a concern, this reply for instance is over the limit! 571
Having said that however, its amazing what does fit into 500 chars. And you can always reply to your own post to further expound on your conversation.
The nice thing about Mastodon is that the format is somewhat familiar, and it works well on mobile, and the feed is similar to G+, in that you have a mixture of posts from a variety of sources all in one interface.
@Brandon_Satterfield Please take a look at http://holographyforum.org from mobile. I still own the URL but I passed off responsibilities to a professor long ago. http://holographyforum.org
We were a self supported community and in the beginning I would look up answers in my textbooks. After a few months of that more experienced people found it valuable and started sharing. I got emails for them and if I knew they had something to offer a discussion I would email them a link and politely ask them for help. Eventually it became the third hit for holography on Google and the first hit for holography forum. After I left activity declined slowly and a particularly skilled but socially challenged individual created a lot of conflict. Now it is a shadow of what it was in 2010.
I think of setting it up as more of a creative space with a sideline if tech support would be the model that would help. I would gladly, as I am sure most of us here would be, make early posts showing a gallery of pictures. If we set the tone early on we just might make it work.
Hey @Colin_Kaminski I checked it out via mobile and I followed the wiki to the forum. This looks similar to the old forum I used to have. You coded this out?
@Brandon_Satterfield I just installed existing add-ons to phpBB. I did some custom header and footer work but it no longer survives. I can code php and MySQL but not professionally.
Well sir, that’s two languages I can’t speak so you got me by a land slide!
Let me look into templates over the next month or so and see if there is something easy to drop into the server.