A few days ago I was researching a bug I was seeing using with xfce on chrome remote desktop. Apparently this was thoroughly solved in someone's Google+ post that everyone linked to. All I can see now is the Google+ termination notice. Thanks, Google.

Google was one party in that. The other was the person who choose to gave Google the content to post. When we choose to give content and power to a few, large, centralized organizations, that's on us.

What would you have expected them to do? Would you point to the user if Stack Overflow stopped hosting content? Or GitHub? Before places like imgur, I'd see forum postings linking to broken images hosted on personal sites--so self hosting is unfeasible. Geocities data is still around as well as Usenet postings going back to the 80s.

> Stack Overflow

... which licenses its content with CC by SA 4.0[1] and has a public API.

Other licensing models of content will vary.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

This is an important point. Someone else is allowed to use the StackOverflow content and likely would if StackOverflow was turned off.

I do think that is worth noting, but it is (mostly) separate from the original point. It doesn't matter if the copyright is open if the content disappears.

At least in the U.S., I don't think it's that relevant to the use-cases I've seen. IANAL, but in the 4-factor fair use test a place like Internet Archive rehosting the content to me easily clears 3 of them if the original host goes away.

These days IPFS is getting closer to being a real alternative.

Check the Internet Archive. I want to say they grabbed a copy of all the Google+ posts, but I might be wrong.

They did; I just looked up someone's post about USB-C standards the other day

But these are all things where Google was late to the game and didn't succeed in taking someone's crown. So it's an interesting question: How does Google failing at some product that isn't already a well established concept impact the consumer's sentiment towards the idea behind it.

FWIW Google had orkut long before facebook became a success and moved out of colleges. Google had gtalk long before WhatsApp was conceived.

Orkut was pretty much killed in the English speaking world by the Brazilian Portuguese speakers which took over any group which was created. They pushed every photography, climbing and Linux group to the point where, as a non-Portuguese speaker, the site became way more noise than signal. You could flash a group as being for a specific language, but it wasn't enforced when someone violated this. Orkut admins ignored complaints and the malfeasanant posters rebutted with something which might translated to "who's going to make me?"

So, it became a useless site because there were no teeth to the rules.

>Orkut was pretty much killed in the English speaking world by the Brazilian Portuguese speakers which took over any group which was created. They pushed every photography, climbing and Linux group to the point where, as a non-Portuguese speaker, the site became way more noise than signal.

This is the source of the HUEHUEHUE meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/huahuehuahue . There's even an academic study on the Brazilian online cultural traits that cause such problems in Orkut! https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265844216_'HUEHUEHU...

Microsoft had MSN Messenger, there was ICQ and many others, and there was "always" IRC etc., and frankly things were great with gAIM, Pidgin and other messenger aggregators until Google Talk switched off access for third-party apps and launched Hangouts...

I remember my whole family was in gtalk and other jabber talkers. The funny thing they were usable on mobile long before android/ios phones. There were JavaME clients that could run on many common phones. I still miss T9.

GTalk was really in a position to be the #1 messenger.

Sad thing was google+ and the control it offered was nice. The tech communities on G+ were wonderful but for the average person they were just too entrenched in facebooks ever growing social iron fist.