Well, ladies and gentlemen…it was nice knowing all of you here on G+ Maybe within the next week we can start a thread somewhere of active users and what other social media we can use to follow you on.
The wind-down is going to be a 10-month long ordeal, so we have time to find alternatives and then lock down this community and try and ensure that people are aware of those alternatives.
https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-strobe/
Thoughts on attempting a mass migration to another platform? There’s Google Groups, various forums, Facebook (ulgh)…
I own http://makerlibrary.com but not the resources to develop it. 10 months should be enough to become a professional first-class web developer, right?! 
It’s got a 10 month wind-down period so it’s not the huge rush. August 2019.
Maybe on discord?
@ThantiK Domain and Software aren’t really the issue here. We need to define what we want, how it needs to look, who will run it / host it / pay for hosting and than do it (which is propably 99% of the real work)
@Nils_Hitze I have to disagree with that. I’m on Fosstodon, an instance of Mastodon and it gives the same community feeling as a good G+ community. Threads are easy to follow and to participate in. The only thing I don’t know in terms of a user perspective is how it scales.
Twitter?
I see value in the decentralized model, but I think something like Mastodon is going to have near-zero organic user growth, while Facebook (ulgh) has tons of organic growth.
What drives user growth for a community like this? Largely searchability. Where are people searching? Google, Facebook, etc.
Do we want to go where the people are? That’s largely Facebook and Reddit.
I have a GSuite subscription and could open up a paid Google Group (which I will commit to maintain for the next decade) pretty easily, but only if people actually want to use Google Groups. It’s a pretty vanilla forum that you can interact with via email if you prefer.
I think Google Groups is an easy temporary solution… But putting my hand back on the chopping block with googles track record of product support is not super appealing. I wish there was a drop in decentralized system that checks all the boxes… But I don’t know of any that have all the niceties of G+.
At the end of the day even if it’s just an old school forum so long as this group of great minds has a place to meet up… even if it isn’t as perfect, I will happily go there if you guys are there when I arrive.
Facebook won’t ever be suggested by me. If anyone wants to contact me and offer suggestions, I’d be welcome to hear them. So far Mastodon, Reddit are interesting. (there already exists a 3DP community there, but I’ve asked to be moderator there before and they didn’t seem interested) - I enjoy making sure spam stays cleaned up, being janitor, and helping answer questions whenever possible.
The cards format of G+ and the way things were sorted, searchable, etc were always what I enjoyed about this place. Nothing else replicates that quite as nicely.
G+ was good for dumping information, getting assistance, and learning in a centralized forum. Doubt there will be much to replace it
I always wanted them to have the cards “swipe left to hide”. Guess that ain’t gonna happen