After migrating my former Google+ group, "Haskell: The Haskell-Beginners Community," from Google+ to another social network service with functionality for creating categories within groups, I wasn't certain if I had correctly used the Google Takeout export service to export the posts in my own stream.

Unfortunately, upon inspecting the Google Takeout zip file downloaded, I discovered that the file only seems to contain my posts from sometime in 2015.

However, I do have most of my original posts from when I first joined back in 2012 in JSON, WordPress 5.x, and Blogger format.  These posts were downloaded prior to April 2 using Google+ Exporter.

This means that, in their current format (in which they will most likely stay, since, unlike some other former Google+ users, I am not a programmer and do not have the ability to reformat my posts from JSON format to Google Takeout format), my posts can be imported into either WordPress or Blogger (although I do not have a Blogger account, and my WordPress account cannot be used to import my posts because it is dedicated to topics involving functional programming), but not into LifeCloud (which I hardly use, anyway).

Ironically, they can be imported into MeWe (which only accepts JSON format), which I have no intention of using.

Now that the Google+ ship has been scuttled by Google itself and has sunk to the bottom of the proverbial sea, I must start upon the arduous task of rebuilding....

Back on Google+, I had a maximum follower count of 584, and a count of 578 at the last time that I checked before the social network service was taken offline.  By contrast, here, I currently have a grand total of 1 follower.

Now, my first post on Google+ was dated at 5:11 AM on September 29, 2011, and my last currently recorded post there was dated at 11:46 PM on March 29, 2019.  The duration was approximately 8.5 years.  This means that I now have 8.5 years to earn back another 583 (or 577, depending on the viewpoint) followers.

Somehow, I seriously doubt that I will earn back that many followers here on Dreamwidth, even given another 8.5 years.  A more reasonable estimate is that I might be able to earn back approximately 34 followers within 2 years (that was the approximate number of followers that I was able to earn back on Facebook before switching jobs, after which the number of my followers stayed substantially the same until I eventually deleted my account).  After 8.5 years, I would probably be very lucky to have even 99 followers.

Followers are extremely difficult to acquire unless the social network service has many users who share a large number of similar interests.  Although Dreamwidth has some users who share my recreational interests, it has very few users who share my scholarly interests.  Although most scholars write extremely well, many non-scholar role-playing gamers do not; this aspect forces me to be very selective in choosing which of the latter group with which to correspond if I wish to focus on any sort of intellectually interesting conversation.

This means that the number of my followers, grouped by interest, would probably be somewhat similar to the following after 8.5 years:

poetry:  15 users
Haskell:  2 users
Scheme:  1 user
category theory:  1 user
astronomy:  5 users
natural science:  5 users
computer science:  2 users
Final Fantasy XI Online (solo-play):  1 user
Final Fantasy XIV:  A Ream Reborn (solo-play):  1 user
Dragon Quest X Online (solo-play):  0 users
Elder Scrolls Online (solo-play):  1 user
Lord of the Rings Online (solo-play):  1 user
Secret World Legends (solo-play):  0 users
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total:  35 users

Alas.

Joerg Fliege has submitted the following post on Google+ (see https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/8Utg5o3otfj):

"Ode to LiveJournal. A site brought down, perhaps, by its hardcore old-style user base.

The inertia of user expectations could become almost impossible to overcome. [..] “We were always saying that we were fighting for the users, that we would run everything by the community before we did anything,” says Mark Smith, a software engineer who worked on LiveJournal and became the co-creator of Dreamwidth. “Well, as it turns out, when you do that, you end up with the community telling you that they want everything to stay the same, forever.

Paolucci sums it up best: “Back in 2007, at the height of the burnout phase, when we were all going for the gallows humor, we joked that we would post in the news journal that we were giving everybody $100, a pony, and a latte, and the first five comments would be people objecting that they couldn’t have caffeine, somebody saying they were allergic to ponies, and somebody going to a screed about how free money is the root of all evil in society,” she recalls.