Hive is a blockchain born more than 4 years ago. It is a great tool for anyone intending to get into this technology for the first time, as it offers a nice "familiar" path to interact and learn while experiencing the community interactions as any other centralized social media service.
This post intends to describe some easy steps to get your hands into the platform.
The first thing you need to know is Hive, like any other blockchain, stores data in a way that can not be deleted or modified, anything you do publish, even if you do mistakes, will be stored in the blockchain forever, only the front-ends which are the webpages offering a nice User Experience to interact with the blockchain, are the ones which "hide" the content when you delete something so it is not seen, but everything remains in the blockchain as you can check in the Hive Explorer, but don't worry, you will not have to experiment with such an "ugly" webpage to use and interact in Hive.
The first thing you will need to do is to get a Hive account. Accounts actually cost a small amount of money in Hive, and there are several providers offering you a way to get one, some charge you a small amount of money and some may still be free. You can head over https://signup.hive.io/ and try Ececny as it remains one of the only free ones. Ecency is a nice front-end created by some developers which runs on a webpage a desktop dApp or a smartphone dApp.
You can also sigup into Ecency from their webpage to get an account for free.
While creating your account, you will be provided with a TXT file containing your username, main key (passwords are named Keys in blockchain industry) and several other keys. Make sure you keep all that information safe, if you lose it, you will never be able to recover your account and the money which may be holding it as every account in Hive gives you access to the wallet associated with the account.
Once your account is created, you are ready to jump and write your first post, but it is much better if you wait before I introduce you to all the functionalties, you will bet much more out of the community.
