Ok, so, as we're watching bitcoin go parabolic and we ware waiting for the altcoin rush there's lots of interest in creating a token, getting websites going powered by that token, and grouping your community together in a single site. I call the combination website of a blog, a forum, and a video platform powered by a steem-engine token a "Tribe."

The blog (Nitrous) and forum (TokenBB) are available now. The video platform is (allegedly) available to the public starting next week.

I think this is going to be a major deal for Steem-engine and frankly all of steem! Starting next week for less than $2k you'll have your own video platform powered by your own token!!! Find that deal somewhere else! I don't think it exists.

Steps to make a tribe

You're going to need a few things to make a tribe.

$500-2000 in ENG depending on how many services you want to start with.
You'll have to buy more or rent more ENG to stake as your community grows.
You'll need a team of people. I suggest no less than 5 and no more than 20.
You need to come up with some technical settings and names.
You're going to need a few types of community standards.

The team

You need a mix of folks. You need some people people, some computer/math people, and some financial people. Steem-Engine does a lot of the heavy lifting to get websites off the ground, but it still helps to have at least one technical person on the team. If you hope to market this token or see it grow you probably want to get someone with a little money or connections to businesses or communities to help you grow it. If you're dealing directly with the community (which you will) you'll want some gregarious people to interact socially with your user base.

Simple version of a Tribe; it's still kinda technical

In the simple version we're going to create a token and just have our own blogging platform to go with it.

To start you have to make a token. This happens on steem-engine.com and costs 100 eng.

When you create a token you set the name, symbol, max supply, URL, and decimal precision. The URL can change, the Decimal Precision can increase, everything else can't be changed.

Once you create your token if you're logged in on that account there's a little info button and you can change the URL, edit the description and add a little logo.

Once you have the token you need to enable staking (there's a diamond icon in the wallet if you're the issuing account). You'll have to set the unstaking period. This too can't be changed. Make sure you set the unstaking longer than the time to recover your VP. So, if it takes 5 days to recover your VP after voting down to 0% make sure that unstaking is slightly longer than that. You have to burn 1000 ENG to make a token be allowed to power up.

Initial Supply and Distribution

The ultimate number doesn't really matter. If you make a lot of tokens they will be worth less. If you make fewer they will be worth more. The value will really be determined by the number of people that accept them for value and the number of use cases and sinks the team and the community provide.

I suggest making new tokens between 1M and 100M in supply. 21M is a familiar number because of BTC. If you're going to have an inflation pool on these (if you're want a voting style website you need an inflation pool) then you'll want a max supply much higher to account for years of inflation.

When distributing them I would suggest what I'll reference as the PALnet model. 10% to founders, 10% on a central account, 20% claimed to an existing community, and the rest is sold at a set price on the open market. You obviously don't have to follow that exactly, but it seems to get a variety of stakeholders involved and provide opportunity for new people.

Now that you have a token let's distribute it with Scotbot

Now you're going to have to setup your scotbot instance. You actually don't have to have your own website because just using tags on steempeak or steemit is enough, but most people want their own website too (1000 ENG setup cost).

Scotbot is fairly complicated because we give you a lot of control of a complicated thing. Part of a good team is that you'll want a dev or someone pretty math friendly to take a look at it.

Setting up Scotbot will make you answer questions like "how much inflation should we have?" With high inflation you're diluting the stake of the founders and starting account. You're doing that with the intention to bring in new people. If you're bringing in new people with high inflation the economy can likely sustain it. If you're giving away high inflation and no one is buying or coming it's likely going to simply hurt your founding accounts.

What is high inflation is relative to initial supply. 1M new tokens might sound like a high inflation but if you're starting with 10T it's really not. Steem is still considered a high inflation token and has under 10% inflation.

If you're stuck without a dev we can provide some help. there are some posts describing the settings in channels in the Discord room. So, if you have questions start at the documentation, and if you still have questions me or the devs can help.

https://steemit.com/steem-engine/@holger80/scotbot-parameter-manual

For each inflation pool you choose to have we'll charge 1 staked eng per active user to keep the lights on.

Nitrous

Now you might want to get your own website. A starter one is pretty simple. It costs 1000 ENG to setup. We forked condenser which is the program that runs steemit.com and we rewired it to display steem-engine tokens as the rewards. You can also get a steempeak variant.

After initial setup it costs 1 staked eng per active user. That means you don't actually have to pay us anything per month. Just keep eng staked as your user base grows. If you stop staking we'll turn off the website and scotbot after some warnings.

This setup is pretty easy. You get a domain name from a website like godaddy.com. You fill out the form on website. We spin up a server. And you point your domain to the server address we give you.

We can do small tweaks like add links or change a few colors and a logo. If you want a lot more changes we charge $100 per hour for dev work.

That said you can do the dev work on your own. Eon will slap your Nitrous is a repo you can access on github so you don't have to deal directly with us for changes.

Non Technical- Community Guidelines

I know I just spoke a lot about the technical requirements. They are important for sure, but I think a community really needs to focus on community guidelines.

You'll have tough decisions like muting bad actors, team member participation, content that's not supported, flag guidelines for the community and a lot of other pieces.

You're going to want some guidelines for the founders, community members, chat hub (like discord or telegram), rules for bots, and anything else you think is important.

I've been managing communities on the blockchain for a while. It's incredibly difficult to manage effectively if you don't have a doc to based things from. You don't need every rule written down, but you need some basics that become the standard way to behave. Then if people break them it's easy to enforce