go to http://friendica.com

I have more or less the same problem (Twitter, Facebook, G+, Status.Net, Homepage/Blog, Linked.In, Xing, Friendica)

My current usage:
- Homepage/Blog as my “business card” and for long public articles
- Status.Net for short notices and to follow free software people
- Twitter to follow people from politics, etc. I forward my status.net messages to Twitter but never write active
- Xing/Linked.In passive just for business contacts
- Facebook for family contacts, more or less passive
- G+ sadly replaces more and more Status.Net. But I can understand it, technically speaking it is a really nice platform.
- Friendica to play arround with it. A really nice distributed social network which can connect with many existing networks.

So my usage comes down to
actively: Homepage/Blog, Status.Net and G+
passive: Twitter, Facebook, Xing, Linked.In

(Maybe twitter and StatusNet will switch in the future. I’m not really happy with status.net 1.x and since most free software people seems to move to G+)

I think that’s OK but of course could be better.

Regarding distributed social networks like Diaspora and Friendica. At the beginning I like it a lot but they have two drawbacks:
1. Not that much people online, which of course can improve in the future.
2. On social networks like Facebook, G+, Friendica/Diaspora I want to share public and private posts. Even if Facebook and probably G+ has many problems regarding privacy etc it is one central place where I can delete my data and can control the access to the data. On distributed systems even my private messages get spread over hundreds of servers (depending where my friends are). I can’t revoke the messages from all that servers and I have to trust all the different admins of the server. The more I think about it I’m not sure if this is really an improvement.

John

For reading and responding, I’m personally all over the place, I wish I could get just the most interesting things to pop up in my rss reader when I’m desperately in need of a info fix,(which I guess is why I subscribe to this blog ;) ) but so far that’s been a challenge.

I prefer support a decentralized/alternative social network. I hope more people join Diaspora, so we can finally have a social network that do not depends of economic and corporate decisions and respects its users privacy.

Every year a new social network will appear, people will move from one to another (or try use many as they can). Social networks will die and born. I prefer support one that is supported by a community with shared needs.

I also think is important do not produce content in proprietary networks. If you share your thoughts there, people will want stay there to read your interesting thoughts.

The success of Diaspora depends of its users discussing and posting interesting content there.

Twitter and Facebook may work really well bothl as primary or as secondary media. Yes, both are vendor-locked too, but at least they are mature and have good APIs. Whether to use them or not, is mostly a matter of who you talk there to, and how public/private they are. For me, my personal blog, my tech blog, Twitter and Facebook all connect me to different social circles.

Niche social networks like identi.ca or Diaspora may work only if you post mostly in public, but you already have a blog for that…

Personally, I don’t think G+ is mature yet to use it as a primary social network. And many design flaws just don’t allow me to use it as the only tool. That said, I mostly use LiveJournal when I want to control access rights and HTML, FB to anything which I think is actually public, and Twitter for mostly public talk with people I don’t really know. Links, tech stuff, politics, occasional life event. Somehow I am reluctant to update my Blogger tech blogs, and use Tumblr to write short notes which don’t fit 140 chars.

I reset the passwords to really long diceware passphrases and gpg encrypted a file containing the passwords in my home drive. I’m really surprised it took that much willpower as i never used social networking heavily, but it can be really addictive.

Now i use google plus and while not all of my friends use it, i’m not that worried about it.

Don’t tell Eben Moglen you are still on Facebook:

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/13/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/

Don’t bother. Just publish what you want, when you want, on your website. If the software you use on your website doesn’t offer microblogging/etc/blah, add your own instance of StatusNet, Diaspora, whatever. For those social networks that don’t offer aggregation (from your own site), post one last post saying where you are moving to and move on.

But also that’s not practical. It just isn’t going to happen right now, particularly for the ones on Facebook. They will look at it as: “All my friends are on Facebook. Why bother?” And they would, in a certain sense, be sadly right.