Tuesday, April 2, 2019

The G+ Archives

Today is April 2, 2019, and those of us who regularly used Google+ are sitting waiting for the end. Google announced that the platform would go down sometime today. As of this moment, it's still there. But the end is soon.

G+ was mostly ignored by the larger world, but it was a hotbed of activity for the RPG scene. The initial integration with Hangouts meant that bloggers and other RPG folks could easily coordinate and play games with each other online. That led to a critical mass of gamers--especially indie RPG and OSR gamers--hanging out and talking on G+, and it became a sort of constant, ongoing salon. Ideas where exchanged, friends and partnerships were established. There was drama, yes, and schisms and bad actors. But overall: it was really something.

In the past few months, I've used Friends+Me's Google+ Exporter to archive about 30 RPG communities and back them up onto WordPress sites. Those archives live here:

https://gplusarchive.online

The archived communities are:

Together, there are about 37,000 posts and 282,000 comments saved.  My hope is that people of the future can continue to reference these communities, not just as historical artifacts but as a source of wisdom and insight. There is gold buried in these archives. In the future, I intend to mine some of it for this blog. I hope others do likewise. 

If I didn't archive your community: I'm sorry. It wasn't an intentional thing. I started with the ones that I was active and involved in, then expanded to various communities related to PbtA games.  I feel bad that I didn't get any OSR communities, but I was never directly involved in those and didn't even know where to start.

Cheers.

-Jeremy

3 comments:

  1. That's amazing, I was sad to lose all of that but you saved my day. Thanks.

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  2. Thanks so much for putting the work in Jeremy. I only just found these communities as they were struggling with the impending doom. I'm looking forward to mining the archives for useful content in the very near future.

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  3. You deserve a lot of praise for doing this. I linked over here today to try and let others know about it. Thank you.

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