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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.

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Some people are trying to build a community here: https://neocities.org/

I can't believe that website is still around. I just got teleported to the 90's.

Neocities isn't that old. Perhaps you're thinking of Geocities, the '90s vintage website that inspired it?

I realized later that it's Geocities v2; essentially. Still a fun thought that sort of service is still a thing. I think Medium.com is probably the best offspring that I can think of.

Those who want and for whom $5 is pocket change is encouraged to make a paid account to support it.

(Happy supporter, otherwise unaffiliated.)

And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.

Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.

But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.

And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2021/03/23/microsoft-discord...

Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing.

Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.

You can get it on linux: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/github-desktop-bin/ (mentioned in the official docs) or https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop.

What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.

Why would I need an "official desktop app" for anything, if I got a perfectly good git, and with git being perfectly integrated in modern IDEs (should I need a more GUI approach?)

I found active bookmarks in Firefox to meet my needs before they removed that feature. I don't remember Google Reader all that well and I'm wondering how it was different than other RSS readers. For example, Akregator is commonly available today. (I remember that Google Reader could aggregate more than just RSS feeds, but I don't remember exactly what.)

... so everything consolidated in G+?

Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.

But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar.

But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.

First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing

I swear material design was the result of one too many post-it note sessions.

This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click.

I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...

Maybe they added it later? When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.

Did people have to have G+ accounts to receive invites? I know Facebook requires it, but if they just used standard calendaring events (maybe with an info link to g+?) that would seem a winner

G+ had events, I used to use them all the time. And then they removed them from communities, which was a large portion of how people (in my circles at least) used them. So that made it a lot less useful.

I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a cool idea at the time, I thought.

That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated.

They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.

Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.

It was crappy but it's intention was good.

We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.

For some reason I never saw it working.

Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?

https://youtu.be/eKUAqNGVwX0

It wasn't the fastest, but I think that now browser (and CPU) tech has moved on since then, it'd probably be a lot smoother. I remember using it once to coordinate specs on a small contract job and it worked pretty well for that.

I liked wave a lot as well.

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