| For a lot of people and groups, the Internet Archive is their only hope at preserving at least some of their Google+ content. I've been working with many of them over the past six months. Google+ had millions of active users of a wide range of technical skills, but by far the majority at the lower end of the scale. Even the ones with technical chops were often limited by budget, network bandwidth, costs, or reliability, or other factors, in what they could do. Google+'s promise was to host text, image, and video content with Google's deserved reputation for high reliablity. The company itself is not, as many other failed social and online media services were, going out of business. It's simply decided to exit this particular activity. The first realisation I had of the problem Google+ Communities faced was when someone commented on the subreddit I'd created about the G+ shutdown that they were wondering how they were going to move 400,000 users and content to a new home. I didn't even know how many communities G+ had. The online information I'd found said about 5 million, but on checking it was actually 7.9 million as of late November, 2018, and over 8.1 million by January 2019. Through Loysoft (Friends+Me), I got a summary dump of all 8.1 million communities and some overview characteristics (members, posts and posting dates), and could finally start getting a handle on how many significant communities there were. That resulted in an extract of about 100,000 communities of 100+ members and posting activity within the previous 30 days, which was used for outreach and migrations. I made that freely available to anyone looking to assist in migrations. But a lot of communities were missed, Google itself shut down the G+ Communities serving Community owners and moderators, with no notice, making outreach all but impossible. Is there a lot of crap data out there? Yes, there is. But there are also some gems, and the task of sorting between the two in advance of archiving it is more effort than simply archiving everything and making it available. And the Internet Archive has set itself the mission of total archival, where possible. So there's that. The questions are ones we're discussing though at the PlexodusReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus |