I’ve just deleted my presence on facebook and Twitter. Another of my activities is Airgunning and facebook has become hostile to our community.
We set up our own social network here in the UK which fell foul of facebook and our anti-shooting fraternities. We have since moved to hosting in the USA.
The problem we have found is that although people acknowledge there are problems with facebook, they are unwilling to move until they are forced.
Keeping things under your own control is liberating. I found it hard to stay on facebook knowing they were making free use of my personal data while I faced the prospect of losing access to the communities I’m a member of at no notice. I decided to go rather than wait for the inevitable.
@Christopher_Gaul I’ve heard MeWe mentioned a few times along with Pluspora. I’ll check them out along with Minds.
Pluspora doesn’t seem to support communities.
Mattermost? We run a gitlab/mattermost instance at work, mattermost is a open source slack clone, so maybe more a irc replacement. I do not know what to do… i have never had and will never get an FB account. Have a twitter account but never use it. Reddit? Traditional forum? Have used google groups sometimes but i would think a stand alone forum would be better…
If someone set up a mattermost/gitlab/discourse then we could cover project hosting, chat and forum 
@Daniel_Bull right, but a community is technically nothing else than a constant tag … so if we all use #3Dprint there wouldn’t be much difference.
Or maybe only a https://www.discourse.org
“Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Use it as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more!”
@Ulrich_Baer hmm that’s not quite the same thing. You don’t have moderation etc.
@Daniel_Bull yeah it is your post you still moderate it yourself and you block people you don’t like - not sure why you need moderation.
Which ever platform you decide to migrate to I beg you, please select one that lets you separates news from Support & Show-n-Tell.
I come here for the news and to check new interesting ideas/designs for 3D printers - for example the CarbonoidD1 printer and it’s progress and improvements. But, since Google+ doesn’t let you choose what to see in a community most of what I get is pictures of what peoples prints either as a “Look at this nice print!” or “What’s wrong with this print and what causes it?”.
I’m not interested in either so the option to not show those would be great.
Hopefully this is not the end, 3D printing on google+ has been my only source of news regarding 3D printing and there are some truly amazing, creating minds sharing knowledge here.
OK I signed up to pluspora danielbull@pluspora.com from peer pressure I’m going to give it a proper try, it looks like a better version of twitter which is both good and bad. Its bad because I can’t stand twitter and find hashtags horrid but its good because its a massive improvement. MeWe will be next.
OK I just signed up with MeWe as well daniel.bull1 . MeWe seems a much better (or should I say more evolved) system than PlusPora with proper groups, comment editing, etc. but doesn’t seem to have as much going on currently.
To the people suggesting a new forum: why not move to an existing community forum like RepRap or Toms3d? Splintering off yet more 3DP sites seems pretty undesirable to me. And most of these new / open social platforms will end up in practice excluding anybody who isn’t an early adopter type or specifically looking for us there.
For me personally the reason is I want all my hobbies/news/social in one place. I don’t want to have to visit multiple websites/forums just to find out whats going on. I also find forums very hard work, unless you visit them every day you end up turning up and getting thousands of unread posts you can’t possibly keep up with.
@Daniel_Bull agreed all in one place would be great, but seem hard to achieve, or may be with apps like Hootsuite…
Seconded also about unread posts issue in forums, but apps like Tapatalk tend to solve this. Actually the only thing I really miss in forums via Tapatalk is the threading of discussions in posts.
@Christopher_Gaul proper mobile app, let’s give it a try
On a first pass, Minds would be the first I’d investigate further.
I knew there was something I had to do, thanks @Christopher_Gaul I’ve applied to join.
@Daniel_Bull find me there @silopolis
Also joined MeWe and 3D Printing group to see how it’s like…
There is another issue amha. Now that G+ is officially going to close, I wonder if/when Blogger is going to as well. A few of us have spent a ridiculous amount of time posting and describing hacks either as blogger or G+ posts for years (it all started in 2012 for me). So I am with the idea that my next platform will be decentralized at best, or even self-hosted and it would die with me. But any decentralized AND necessarily open-source platform would probably be a good choice since it would leave a chance to migrate the data elsewhere again in case it stops being maintained, e.g.
Hm it would be the appropriate time to write tools for migrating G+ posts to, er… that’s the question we must solve before it really is gone.