Google+ closing, now what?
Like many others I was pretty much pissed off that Google decided to close G+ next August in April. I had a lot of social going on at G+ in fact it was the only social media service that I really used (I have a Reddit account that I hardly use). I believe Winston Churchill said to never waste a good crisis so I took the opportunity to look around at other options. I defined some criteria that could help me choose a new social network.
- preferably open source. G+ wasn’t open source but since I’m an open source advocate it seems appropriate to sign up for a service that itself is open source.
- quality instead of quantity. I’m looking for meaningful conversations and not mindless sharing of kitty pictures.
- will protect my privacy. I understand that no service can fully guarantee my privacy but I’m sick and tired of all the data mining.
- no annoying ads. I’m not against advertisements here and there but I hate these in your face ads on Fartbook.
With these criteria in mind I came up with a short list of three social media services: Mastodon, Diaspora and MeWe. It could have been more but I had to draw the line somewhere. So I signed-up for all three. Preferably I will end up with one or, at the most, two of these. I’m already spending more time on social media than I’m comfortable with. So in the coming weeks I will choose between these three services.
EDIT: I already deleted my MeWe account. It’s a proprietary and centralized service and apparently due to their free speech policy it attracts a lot of nasty people that got kicked out off Facebook. Also I believe that they have a coordinated campaign spamming G+ communities with posts to convince people to move to MeWe.
What about Blogger, Drive and GMail
By closing G+ Google has become unreliable for me. The question is what will they close next and will this affect me? I therefore took a look at other Google services to see if I was exposed to further risks down the line. Most notably I have Blogger, Drive and Gmail so I decided to be one step ahead of Google and say goodbye to these services too. This will not happen overnight but I will do it and post the results here. And the beauty of it all I feel rather good about it.
