Dear #Pluspora users,

It is with a heavy heart that we come to you with this post. As many of you already know, our resident IT admin, David Theiry, passed away suddenly. It has been a huge loss to his family and to the Pluspora family as well.

With David’s passing the Pluspora pod will also be going away. His passing essentially prevents us from maintaining the site as it is today. Nathan and I looked at several possibilities. We considered a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A would have been nice, but unfortunately didn’t work out. Special thanks to those who offered to step up and replace the work David did after his passing, but this is just something no one can fix. David was truly irreplaceable, in many ways, Pluspora being only one of them.

Here are some details you need to know:

The site is slated to go offline by the end of March but we encourage everyone to backup their data by Feb 28th and make an alternate diaspora account as soon as possible, due to instability within the pod. All pod data will be deleted from the server when the pod goes offline and be non-retrievable.

If you go into your Account settings, you can export a backup copy of your data. We recommend you do this, if you want to hang onto the content you have posted on Pluspora over the years. Go to Settings and scroll down to Export Data headings. Please download your data by February 28, as we cannot guarantee it will be retrievable during March.

VERY IMPORTANT: The daily #Checkin will continue on Diaspora for now. Su Ann and her team of mods have a backup plan to keep running on Diaspora without the Pluspora pod. That may change in the future, but just know that it won't go away when the Pluspora pod does. If you have experienced this community, please check it out by seraching the hashtage #Checkin.

Plan B details

Plan B was acknowledging there was no real path forward with the Pluspora pod, but that we would try to find a few options where we could go together after Pluspora goes offline. Please let us know via comments which of the following you would be most interested in pursuing. Remember, it's not one or the other, you can choose several options and see what sticks. Nathan and I don't want to leave anyone feeling stranded or left behind due to these unforseen and sudden tragic circumstances.

A new and exciting Pluspora community on Mighty Networks. Nathan and I have been exploring the possibility of continuing the Pluspora community as a whole on Mighty Networks which is a social network platform for communities. Nathan and I would financially and technically support this platform and are currently building this space for Pluspora and other users interested in continuing the Google Plus tradition and spirit of community. We’d love everyone’s feedback, as this is a new opportunity to make some changes. More details to follow. (Side note: there are communities and you can edit posts!). We welcome anyone who wants to pitch in.

Other options for Pluspora users

Twitter Community for Pluspora users. Nathan reached out to Twitter and they have given him early access to create a Twitter Community -- it’s similar to a Google+ Community. Twitter Communities is in early stages for Twitter and it’s a great chance for us Google+ and #PlusporaRefugees to give some good feedback on future features. And a great way to reconnect with Pluspora folks. Nathan and I will be mods of the Community starting out, so you can catch us there. There will be lots of potential for how to use the Community and feedback will be welcome. There’s loads of potential. Plus, a lot of Google+ refugees are already on Twitter, so it’s a good time to reconnect. Use the following tweet to join: twitter.com/babylontales/statu…

Migrating to another Diaspora pod. As you likely know, Pluspora is just a pod or instance in the Diaspora fediverse. Feel free to look at other pods and consider creating a new account on one of them. For a lot of you, Pluspora was your introduction to Diaspora and the fediverse. It doesn’t have to be your last. Feel free to give pods you like a shout out in the comments.

Mastodon is a Twitter-like fediverse platform. Mastodon is a great alternative to Diaspora that keeps you in the fediverse. Unlike Diaspora though, Mastodon takes most of its design choices from Twitter. It is very much a micro-blogging format. It also uses instances and is a lot of fun. It also has many mobile apps, unlike Diaspora.

Pillowfort.social is a Tumblr alternative. If you want to pivot to something different, but don’t want to go to the major players like Facebook and Twitter, there’s Pillowfort. It rose up after Tumblr dropped NSFW content (like Diaspora, Pillowfort also allows NSFW content). It is currently in beta and requires a one-time fee of $5 to join, this helps pay for their upkeep -- they have no ads. It has Communities, which I know is something we all missed from Google+.

Please feel free to make other suggestions in the comments. The community belongs to everyone, and these are just suggestions that we came up with. There definitely needs to be discussion and support for everyone.
The ark sets sail again.

Conclusion

We are also sending this information out via email to a lot of you. Not as many as we would have liked, because cataloging email addresses from Diaspora is a time-consuming process. David and I never wanted to spam anyone with emails, so we didn't really create a database proactively. Nathan and I have spent many tedious hours manually filtering through as many active users from the past several years to send out this notice to. We won’t hit everyone’s inbox and for some of you it may go to your junk folder. But we wanted to reach out to as many folks as possible about this, especially those who were active and had content that needed to be exported.

That said, it would help us tremendously if you submitted your email address to us here: forms.gle/HXvHsAFTcvY5JM7A9.
We will NOT spam you or send anything more than the alerts about closing of the pod, and the what comes next, if you ware interested in knowing.

Please share this post. Thank you all for keeping the community spirit alive for as long as you have. I truly hope we can continue in some way. I have no attachment to any particular outcome, save that we aren't torn apart again.
❤

Di

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