I've resumed the flat-earth debate in a reshare (same Community) so that DW can't delete my comments, because this kind of willful illogic really ticks me off: https://plus.google.com/+WoozleHypertwin/posts/BRBrSHNsnA5
@woozle Modern day flat-Earth cultists are a strange phenomenon to me...I used to think it was some kind of elaborate joke or troll that gained a life of its own. Now I'm not sure what to think.
what's Google Plus actually like? never used it for anything past its initial months, whence I got my account suspended for using a pseudonym
They eventually dropped the "real name" requirement after the data revealed what we'd been telling them all along, i.e. that it doesn't promote civility.
Most of my gripes about G+ fall into two categories: (1) Google is evil, and (2) Google is uninterested in user needs (though they keep claiming they are).
All that said, it's the first place I ever found enough of an audience to regularly get some interesting discussions going.
(I could go on, but I'm out of characters.)
@woozle at least it looks less awful than Facebook, just in terms of appearance...Facebook has always looked awful
@kara_dreamer Yeah, it is generally much better than FB, and not just in terms of layout.
That said, they keep "updating" the layout in ways that generally make it worse, but it's still way ahead.
Also, the editor supports markup for bold and italic.
@woozle Facebook doesn't?! plain text only? ("plain" isn't quite the word though for a site as cluttered and obtrusive as FB)
@woozle oh, hm! looks nice enough. is there much of a community?
@kara_dreamer There's a bit of one, but it's mostly focused around development so far. (I need to catch up in my reading; it may have evolved since then.)
I keep hoping I can get more people to join, because it's much better for long/complicated discussions than Masto's format is.
I haven't been pushing it much yet, though, because I haven't yet tried to upgrade -- and when I last tried an upgrade on HZ's predecessor, Friendica, it killed the site & I haven't been able to fix it.
@kara_dreamer Last I saw, they still don't support any kind of markup except hashtags.
I can understand a platform like Mastodon trying to keep things simple, but that's hardly Facebook's strategy....
I'm still hoping something like Hubzilla will fill the FB/G+ niche in the fediverse. It supports a much more complete markup system, including display text for links. See for example https://hub.iseeamess.com/channel/woozle/?f=&mid=130ef351240b4c824763ff317fbbb99e1a8dd973f105692b49042bdcde4d955d@hub.iseeamess.com (I still hate its URL scheme).