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:

• Blades in the Dark
  
• The Dungeon World Tavern
• Inverse World
• Lampblack & Brimstone
• Planarch Codex: Astral Repository
• Stonetop
• Worlds of Adventure
  
• Powered by the Apocalypse
• Alas for the Awful Sea
• Bluebeard's Bride
• Epyllion
• Legacy: Life Among the Ruins
• Masks: A New Generation
• Monster of the Week Roadhouse
• Monsterhearts
• Nahual
• Night Witches
• Pasión de las Pasiones
• Sagas of the Icelanders
• The City of Judas
• The Sprawl
• The Veil
• The Watch
• Uncharted Worlds
• Urban Shadows
• Veil 2020
• Velvet Glove
• Wheel Tree Press (the Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power, Time Cellist, Greenlight)
• World Wide Wrestling
• Worlds in Peril
  
• The Gauntlet

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