Episode: 2910
Title: HPR2910: Better Social Media 02 - Pluspora
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2910/hpr2910.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:07:02

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This in HPR episode 2,910 entitled MetaSocial Media Nero 2, plus Paula, it is hosted by AYUCA
and in about 10 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is plus Paula, one advertised as a federated alternative to Google Plus.
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Hello, this is AYUCA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in
my new series called Better Social Media and I'm going to be covering a few of the alternative
applications that are out there. That leaves plenty of room for anyone else to pick up one of the
ones that I didn't cover or provide an alternative point of view to the ones that I do cover.
And I'm sure all of that could make for great discussion.
So what I want to do today is talk about an application called Plus Paula.
Yeah, once upon a time there was a social network from Google called WorkIt
or was it Buzz? Oh wait, it was called Google Plus. Yeah, I remember.
In the final analysis, it served mostly to prove that Google cannot do social.
But in many ways, it was much better than the alternatives.
People with technical backgrounds were far more likely to be found there and it was great for
photographers. But in the end, as with so many things, Google killed it.
So, parenthetical note, do not ever rely on anything from Google they cannot be trusted.
But when they announced that they were going to kill it, people started looking around
for a place of refuge for people who liked Google Plus and were not ready to resign themselves
to Facebook. And two main contenders emerged, Plus Paula and Miwi. We'll talk about both of them,
but this particular episode is all about Plus Paula.
Now, as you might guess from the name, Plus Paula is based on diaspora.
In fact, it is an instance of diaspora, just another pod, basically, as they refer to these things,
which I think is a good demonstration of the strength of diaspora as a platform.
In this case, it is used to try and recreate some of the things that made Google Plus be
loved to that particular community. That said, it does not do everything Google Plus did and
is not exactly the same. But on the positive side, being a diaspora instance means it inherits
a lot of good things from its parents. Well, first, it's open source. The software running it
is just diaspora, which is licensed under the GNU AGPL 3.0 license. And if you want to know what
that's all about, there's a link in the show notes. No one owns it. So while Google can simply
shut down Google Plus because it feels like it, no one can effectively do that to Plus Paula.
It can just be transferred to another server at any time and barring a short period of re-adjustment
keep going as if nothing had happened. Formatting. Now, Google Plus did not have good tools for formatting
your post. Diaspora and, therefore, Plus Paula have great formatting tools, including markdown.
That means if you do long texts, you can have different levels of header, for instance, as well
as lists. Anyone who's used Facebook or Google Plus knows how awful it is to not have tools available.
The feed is strictly chronological. That is something that is a pet peeve for me since I want to see
what the people I know have posted since the last time I checked in.
There are no promoted posts. That's something I hate about Facebook. They promote anything
result in them getting paid and it's mostly garbage. Also, I think a lot of the promoted posts are
designed to get your personal data. Here, there is no one doing that.
Another thing. No one cares about the follower count. If that is the kind of thing you obsess about,
perhaps you should reconsider your life options. But I never cared. If someone follows me,
that's great. If they decide to stop, that's fine too. It's not a moral issue to me.
You can preview your posts. Why don't other social networks get this? I like to be able to see how
my posts will look before I press the share button. You can put in a poll. Easily add a poll to a
post. There's a button at the lower right of the Compose window that lets you easily add a poll.
That's not something you would do every day, I admit. But it's handy to have.
The embedded links are much better. This kind of flows from the attention to formatting, I suspect,
but in any case, you will find this works better in PlusPora. Now, again, to be clear,
these are all features available in diaspora. So, PlusPora gets them through inheritance.
Now to be sure there are some things lacking. One thing that Google did very well was store
large numbers of photos and let you organize them in albums. That's one of the reasons so many
photographers were found there. But that was not really tied to Google Plus other than through
making it easy to post the photos. You can still upload photos to Google in the Photos app and
organize them in albums. I'm going to try to want to depend upon that for the long term,
which is why I have a paid account with Flickr. You know, belt and suspenders, right?
But yes, you can still upload your photos to Google Photos app. You just can't easily share them
the way you could previously. Plus, PlusPora can't do that because it requires a huge amount of
storage space in bandwidth. Now, Google has more storage space in bandwidth than God when you come
right down to it. You can upload photos from your hard drive and embed them in a post and it
does a good job of that. But I will miss Google Plus workflow for sharing photos.
And because Google Plus was so good for photos, it gathered a large community of photographers
that are not likely to move on mass to PlusPora. Another difference is that diaspora has things
called aspects which are a little different from the Google Plus circles. They have some similarities
but are not the same thing. And if you had invested a lot of time and energy into setting up your
circles, you won't be quite as happy. Well, what's the community like? The mechanics are a little
different in PlusPora, but I felt right at home as a refugee from Google Plus. I quickly saw
posts from many of the people I had followed on Google Plus, particularly a number of journalists,
like Esther Schindler, Stephen Vaughn Nichols, and Glenn Moody. The Guardian is now there as well
as Al Jazeera. For me, this is all good. Now, bearing in mind that PlusPora is just an instance of
diaspora, you could follow all of these people through diaspora as well. Now, getting going.
Pretty simple. You don't need to choose a server because PlusPora is a particular server.
You just go to PlusPora.com, link in the show notes, of course, and on the upper right is a
link to create account. Just click it and you can select a username, put in a password, and you're
in business. You probably should do a little to fill out your profile if you want to connect with
more people. This is, again, the same process you would do on diaspora, since this is just another
diaspora pod, but note that you can make different choices if you wish. So you could have a diaspora
account and a PlusPora account. They could have different profile photos, different privacy settings,
and so on. You could, for instance, have different not-safe-for-work settings on the two.
If you tend to make a lot of not-safe-for-work posts on diaspora, but not on PlusPora, just make
the default settings different. Connected Services PlusPora is offering the ability to connect with
Tumblr, Twitter, or WordPress, so you have this available if you want it. In my case, I didn't
really need any of those things, so I just skipped over it. But if that is intriguing to you,
just click on your profile, settings, services, and you will see those options available.
So this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and reminding you as always to support
free software. Bye-bye!
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