Since a great majority of vidders had on the Ning sites their refuge from YouTube, Cop E. Right and buggers, it is a sad new to all of us that this great platform is no longer free. I myself had a Ning community running (non-vidder, non-English, non-virtual series/x-files related), so as soon as Mr. X dropped the bomb, I went running for my life my community.
I thought that it would be hard to find anything like Ning on the web but -- what a surprise! There were some pretty nice sites with very similar platforms -- and free! So, I thought the least I could do was share them with you all Ning refugees.
They are not as good as Ning, I might say, but they cover most of Ning's features and they are the only alternative we have, right? Bellow you can find a full list of what I thought was worth trying
WackWall
It has almost all features Ning has, and it has a Ning export tool, which exports all of your ning members (with profile pics, your profile questions on Ning and all) to WackWall. It doesn't export your videos and photos, though, because Ning does not offer an export tool for these (and, lets be honest, it should, at least when is closing down ALL free ning sites). ...and since WackWall is on its beta version, you can only embed videos for now.
Grou.ps
It's prettier than WackWall, AND it has the Ning export tool either! It has some nice layouts, but it doesn't offer a blog feature to members (it only links to each member's personal blog). AND the max size to a video is 50MB...
SocialGo
Yet another nice alternative, with one of the easiest "manager" menu to deal with. I did not work a lot with this one, and from what I saw, ALL themes are paid, and you can only have full access on the layout manager if you pay, but you can still work on each of your network's page html.
You can only embed videos here, too.
... And that is all -- that it's worth trying, anyway. There are a lot of paid platforms like Ning, and the other free ones I stumbled upon are not even worth a second look.
As you see, they are not as good for vidders as Ning was. My hopes are on WackWall expand its beta version and allow videos larger than 50 MB than Grou.ps...
I wish you all good luck in finding alternatives! And please if you learn about any other free (and nice) place not listed here, let me know so I can add to the list.
