@ThantiK did you ever figure out where you were going to move this group? I know you didn’t want to go to MeWe but I’m just curious as to what your actual plans were.
I believe at some point or another, if nothing comes up, I’m going to suggest the 3D Printing subreddit over on Reddit. It’s got the most content, least chance of being shut down, and while it’s more anti-social media, they’ve got people over there willing to help, lots of people that post, admins who take care of spam.
Its not the greatest of layouts; I much prefer http://old.reddit.com/r/3dprinting (verses the new layout) to anything, but MeWe has stated that they won’t make posts publicly available unless people sign up, making posts there useless for getting information out.
Mastodon, etc and all of those ‘federated’ Social media sites are all just twitter clones. They’re impossible to navigate, cluttered, and the split-communities thing just opposes the social media model where a site gets more popular the more people use it.
I’m sure it won’t go over well with everyone, but it’s the closest I’ve been able to find that checks all the required stuff. I’ve gone about it objectively and been on, essentially, every social media site out there. Reddit checks the most marks.
This also means, however - that I will be ‘out of the loop’ so to speak. The mods over there are established, and aren’t interested in taking me on. This isn’t “my” community anyways. Once G+ shuts down, I’ll likely be elsewhere in the shadows helping people under various pseudonyms. I’m beginning to believe that while social media is good for some things, overall it’s a cancer on society and that I need to take a step away from it and my ‘position’ so to speak.
I’m still around helping everyone I can, I’ll just be abandoning my ‘status’ 
Anyone who wishes to find me, can find me @ gmail; which is the same as my name here. I’ll be there should anyone need help, or to catch up.
http://old.reddit.com
@ThantiK I recently wrote a nano tool to extract all the posts of a community given the Takeout Posts.json file (which only includes the metadata). It would be worth publishing the Posts.json file to let people extract the community posts, or to extract the posts and put the archive somewhere.
The tool (written in Go, but easily translatable to any other language) is here https://github.com/kortschak/delivery/
" I’m beginning to believe that while social media is good for some things, overall it’s a cancer on society and that I need to take a step away from it and my ‘position’ so to speak."
Amen
@Dan_Kortschak I have tried…over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, trying to get the G+ 3D Printing community’s data exported, and it still has never worked for me. Always gets stuck on 90% “An archive of your Google+ Communities data is currently being prepared” and I never get an email link or anything…
Aaaaand it finally worked. Thanks @Dan_Kortschak for the tool! I think you may have me interested in golang as well.
I recently did write a blog post about the FLOSS software to create a community or forum. As mentioned in the blog, this is not an exhaustive list and I’ve kept it brief. I encountered these options after discussions often on G+ and I created (test)forums with some of these options during the last couple of months. I do intend to add Discourse which was mentioned to me several times. Discourse can be self-hosted or the hosting can be done by Discourse company (which comes with a price tag). I hope this is helpful.
@ThantiK If you do decide to step away from it I’ll thank you and all the moderators for all the hard work that you and they did to make this community a succes. I wish you and everyone here lots of fun with 3Dprinting and maybe we’ll meet elsewhere.
@Eric_Buijs I own a domain, http://MakerLibrary.com - but haven’t had the time to see if a social media-style site could be set up on it yet. While I’d love to do this, and I could easily self-host, I took a step back and evaluated my position. I’m nobody special. I help people, and that’s cool - but the only reason I’m where I am is just because I pushed the button before Josef Prusa, or Whosawhatsis, or any of the other like 20-something 3D printing people that were here on G+.
It’s not “my” community to take with me wherever I wish. And I’m not sure that I could remain as stable as something like Reddit. Ultimately, I have to think of what is best for the community without my own personal feelings getting involved. (Personally, I loathe reddit because of the censorship that goes on there, but the censorship that goes on there doesn’t really apply to this community because it’s non-political.)
This thread got me started thinking about self-hosting as opposed to using a public platform. Another option might be WordPress. A search in Google and then in the http://Wordpress.org plugins area shows several plugins that create a forum. These include bbPress, Asgaros, WPForo, and Vanilla Forum (not great rating). I don’t know how useful these would be in comparison to what’s been done here or to what the other options offer.
@ThantiK Will you make the Posts.json or complete zip available? There is a lot of material here that would be useful reference for people here.
@Dan_Kortschak https://drive.google.com/file/d/10YkSAas6o__xyLrD_xbfNnazw_mPKb9v/view?usp=sharing - There ya go. Unfortunately the tool that @Eric_Buijs posted doesn’t do any content-rewriting or image downloading. So it’s a crap-shoot on if this content will continue being viewable after it’s extracted from the json file.
@ThantiK Yeah, when I wrote delivery I was thinking about that, but the image assets are all stored on http://googleusercontent.com, so I think they are fairly safe; the work of cleaning that up without breaking other things within google would be onerous, so I bet it’s likely to stay (though obviously not guaranteed). The links out to other things are just as fragile as they are right now, being dependent on the original posters’ intentions. The text is safe.
Just did the download. A hundred or so posts gave 403 errors (presumably need to be logged in to G+), but there is about 3GB of posts there. Found some things to fix in the code to make it more robust.