Yes - we know that G+ is shutting down.

It’s such a shame that the plug is being pulled on G+; I always found it to be a more intelligent platform than FB, and due to it’s lack of popularity it doesn’t suffer quite as much spam and forced ads. I’m sure that Daniel and Mark will choose a new platform wisely, and look forward to seeing where the community ends up.I do think that a self-hosted platform could work, but understand that the hassle of running one would interfere with the development and support of the library.

My main worry is what happens to the rich content of previous posts, tutorials and advice that has been posted here? How difficult will it be to transfer all of that rich information to a new platform?

@John_Oatham https://github.com/evilgeniuslabs/gplus-archive

Please check this page.

@Chris_Chris Looks useful, but from what I can see I can only archive my own posts. My concern is that unless everyone does that and sets up a Github with public access, the posts from the community might be lost forever, which would be a shame. Also, I’ve tried to extract my own posts, but keep getting zero results back. I know I’ve not exactly been a prolific contributor, but I know I did at least post a couple of possibly useful things a while back :slight_smile:

I see that @Jason_Coon is looking at the possibility of archiving all posts; will leave that in his very capable hands; Thanks Jason!

It seems some G+ users go to https://mewe.com/ I subscribed but don’t really know more about at this point.

Ello seems to have refashioned itself as a social network for “creators”, but I don’t know much about how it works.

I like Reddit and Discord! Porque no los dos??

So many options, which is one that will stay and also have no ads/spam? Never seen this is MeWe before, but hey maybe that would work since not as popular with the marketing folks. Reddit is fine, but threads get lost sometimes.

I’m a long time lurker. But I do have a grow big account on siteground. so if you go with a site, I’ll host it. I just have a couple empty domains on it. Someone would need to admin it though.

I’m also cool with reddit or discord. I use both of those pretty regularly.

@Sam_Guyer I looked at the ello.co link but I don’t see any sort of “groups” aspect. Did I just miss it?

@marmil It looks like they have something called “Communities”. I’m not sure if it does the same thing as groups. I’ll take a look.

I recommend discord

Soooo, have we gotten a final vote?

No, we’ll announce here when we have something up and going

I’d be interested in helping create a custom site. I’m a php developer and think this place needs something more custom. I don’t think the mentioned options (reddit/discord/etc) are a good fit. I don’t even think G+ is a good fit. It’s hard to find good info as it’s spread out all over. We need a couple of good forum categories with tagging. Things like tagging the platform you’re using, the LED type, etc., would make it more helpful and searchable. Code/syntax highlighting is a must. Having a system to create guided multi-page tutorials would also be really nice. There’s a lot of good info on here (G+), but it’s hard to find it. The only real consideration would be hosting it. I doubt it would cost more than $5-10/month though on a cheap Digital Ocean or Linode VPS. I might even be able to spare some bandwidth on one of my servers. I don’t think this is a huge community with a lot of traffic, so it wouldn’t use very much in terms of resources.

@Steve_Animatrix I totally agree with you. Those are not the correct platforms for this kind of community, at least it works, but could be better, easier and indeed searchable is critical to keep content unique. But at the moment they don’t want have a self-hosted solution. Read some older comments.

@Chris_Chris I hadn’t read the requirements (must have native apps, etc), but now that I have, I guess we’ll end up with another subpar platform. Honestly, I rarely come here since it’s been moved to G+ and wanted something better for the community.

If stand alone, it might be best severed to be on http://fastled.io/ versus another DNS, but who would be supporting it? This gets us back to existing online free locations. Tough call but we will get there.

@Steve_Animatrix Same for me, I’m also a php developer and offered them an solution. There are indeed some cons for example the mobile app, but the benefits of having a custom platform, which will exactly fit what the community needs. that is inn my eyes much better. Mobile app is cool to have, but not an requirement for this kind of community imo. A properly working mobile version of community will does his job more than enough.

“A properly working mobile version of community will does his job more than enough.” – for the casual user of the community yes - but not for me - I am often not at a computer when checking in on the community, and between things like push notifications, and a not-web UI flow, etc… I would far rather have an app. The thing folks offering custom solutions seem to be missing, or not focusing on is the need for video/images to be top level – which is a thing that I have not seen any other community discussion/forum site do yet (reddit comes closest, but only barely) - but I’m still looking. As far as self hosting, I don’t want to have to manage a system, and security updates, and other updates, etc… etc… etc… For example, this is why the library is hosted on github instead of my own gitlab instance on http://fastled.io (or my own home grown git server environment, which I use for personal, private projects - but I don’t need that to be available to other users : ) – with all due respect, having been running/managing this community for years, I have a pretty strong handle on what what I want it to have going forward. Also - @Steve_Animatrix , the community has always been here. I started it up here specifically because of the way in which I saw potential for project sharing to be front and center - and Mark and I made the conscious decision to set it up here, vs. on facebook (nononevernotifyoudraggedmenakedoverafieldofbrokenglassat90milesperhourno), reddit, or rolling our own phpbb instance.

The thing is, I have done web development before (and have touched pretty much every server-side tech/language), and I have done custom community sites. I know how easy it is to whip something together that makes a good start - and I also know how long of a slog it is to go from there to something solid, maintainable, fully functional, secure, localized - and that’s not even getting into the ongoing maintenance (bugs, dealing with things broken by browser/server updates, building and managing a roadmap for development on it, etc… etc… etc… ) and we still haven’t even touched mobile apps yet.

If you had something that was already up and running to point to and say “this is mostly functional, we can start from there” - then I could at least take a look at it, but i’m not going to start planning to move to a platform that doesn’t even exist yet, much less know for sure will be finished/available by the time we have to be moved off of g+. I appreciate the offers to help with a custom solution, but I need to make decisions about where we go based on what I know will be there, not intentions.

Openframeworks forum runs on this apparently, and I find it pretty ok: https://www.discourse.org/about discourse.org - What is Discourse? (edit: just read that this doesnt meet the requirements, sorry)