Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd
I&#x27;ve been a long time user, and critic, of Google+.  Now I&#x27;m helping those who want to move off it to find new homes, which has been interesting in itself.<p>I&#x27;d previously measured active public G+ posting activity, by way of the site&#x27;s own Sitemap files.  Stone Temple Consulting expanded those methods to show that:<p>* 91% of all G+ profiles (2.2 billion at the time) had never posted publicly.<p>* About 5% (110 million) profiles showed <i>some</i> public posting activity, other than YouTube (a factor that had inflated apparent activity markedly).<p>* About 6.5 million profiles (0.3%) had over 50 posts ever.<p>* About 3.5 million profiles (0.16%) had over 50 posts <i>and</i> activity within the previous 30 days.<p>That from March of 2015, based on a very large sample of 500,000 randomly selected profiles, using methods I&#x27;d developed a few months earlier.<p>More recently I&#x27;ve been looking at G+ communities, on which there&#x27;d been virtually no quantifiable information.  There are over 8 million of these, though the vast majority have few members and little activity:  the 45%ile membership is 1, the mode is 2, the mean around 130, itself far above the 95%ile (118.5).<p>There are 66 communities of 1 million or more members, 1,100 &gt; 100k, 10,044 &gt; 10k, 64,775 &gt; 1k, and 390,390 &gt; 100.  I&#x27;ve found vital communities across these size ranges, with over 100,000 having 100+ members and activity within seven days prior to accessing, over January 5-6, 2019.<p>Bigger isn&#x27;t necessarily better.  Looking at interactions (posts, comments, plus-ones, shares) by community, <i>size matters little</i>.  It&#x27;s the <i>posting</i> activity that drives other engagement, and the per-member engagement tends to peak between about 100 and 3,000 members.<p>Many of those communities are looking to move elsewhere, as are other G+ users and less formal social or other groups.  Among the frustrations Google has thrown at them, the two leading official Google+ Community-focused communities, Google+ Moderators and Google+ Aspire, were shut down by Google before most communities had really started addressing migration.  In the case of the first, <i>Google shut down the community for six weeks without any notice,</i> with users posts sitting in limbo &quot;held for review&quot;, but appearing as if they&#x27;d been posted by the author.  In the second case, an 80,000 member community focused on Community leaders was shut down without any prior notice.<p>There are several places Plussers can go for information and coordination.<p>The Google+ Mass Migration community, over 4,000 members since 8 October 2018, is the central discussion point on the site itself:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;communities&#x2F;112164273001338979772&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;communities&#x2F;112164273001338979772&#x2F;</a><p>There are numerous off-G+ rallying points, with the &#x2F;r&#x2F;plexodus on Reddit specifically aimed at the migration process itself:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;plexodus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;plexodus</a><p>And there&#x27;s a Wiki with extensive information, including FAQs, planning guides, platform comparisons, data migration information, and directories of users, communities, and off-G+ meeting points, and more.  Much a work in progress, but again, useful to those migrating off the platform:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.antefriguserat.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.antefriguserat.de</a><p>Links to many other communities, sites, and resources are included at all the above.<p>I&#x27;m finding the process and prospect of moving some ... not entirely clear number of users ... off a dying platform and onto new homes a hugely interesting prospect.  There&#x27;s an opportunity to break out of the surveillance capitalism disinformation monopolist mold, and also risks.  I&#x27;ve found out a tremendous amount about developments over the past 5-10 years in online, social, and user-generated media, been digging back through history, discovering I&#x27;m in close contact with some very knowledgeable people (a key Project Xanadu member has been in my Google circles for years, I&#x27;ve just learnt), and more.<p>And there&#x27;s a lot we&#x27;re sorting out about what a migration process entails and requires, and the distinctions between succesful migrations and failures.  I see this being useful to others in the future, possibly sooner than we might expect.<p>Interesting times.