Exodus from Google Plus

As most of you may have heard, Google Plus is planning to shut down in about ten months. As far as anyone can figure out, the only people using it were Google employees and tabletop RPG gamers. The RPG crowd was kind of heavily invested in G+, both for blog promotion and for running games over the Internet. But even though four or five thousand tabletop gamers is quite a lot of people with respect to tabletop gaming, it’s not enough for Google to justify its maintenance.

I mean, they killed off other Google products with more users than that (Google Reader, Google Wave, Orkut.)

People have been planning the exodus over the past week. Two Discord channels have popped up (OSR and DIY RPG, which forced me to give in and start using Discord. But I suppose that had two beneficial side effects:

1. It might spur me into blogging again. Picked up a few ideas during some chats the other day.
2. It reminded me that I’m actually part of a community, where some people actually know who I am, and that I should get back into that community.

I do wonder about how the G+ shutdown is going to affect some bloggers. When G+ first appeared, Google was trying to encourage and/or force people to use G+. Several people linked their Blogger accounts to their G+ accounts to allow G+ to handle comments, or to automatically post notifications of new blog posts to G+. Some of those people later tried to unlink their accounts and discovered, to their horror, that there was no way to do this without deleting their entire blog. Does this mean that everyone else who kept their linked Blogger/G+ account is going to lose everything in ten months?

Fortunately, I never linked my account, so that’s not something I have to worry about. But I feel sorry for those that do have to worry now.