New people show up on Hive, write an introduction post, get almost no engagement, and leave before anyone shows them what this place actually is. Meanwhile the people who would happily help the newcomers, they stick to their own circle, because half the new accounts turn out to be bots or extraction farms anyway, and who wants to support a scammer.
Nobody's fault. It is just how the incentives sit right now. Nobody owns the first month.
So with a bit more time on my hands, i put my mind to building something both useful and fun. I had the lofty goal of fixing the Hive front door and i called it Basecamp. Basecamp would be where you hang your first year on hive, getting to know the chain at your pace. But basecamp would also be a place for veteran profiles to head for some fun and have tools to be better curators. I started working on this idea just over a month ago, some think ai just produces slop ….but i thought fuck it, i like getting my hands dirty, so off i went with my idea to fix Hive’s front door in my Butt way. So here you are… Vibe coding with the Butt journey.
I started with ethos.
I told Claude i wanted to work in a collaborative way, anything we design together should be built with open source mind set. We want people to come add there ideas too. So don’t build anything that blocks easy plug in. We discussed the final goal of creating and SDK that any front end could easily adopt. Which is why i thought best to start with hive.blog and Denser as it also had built in brand reality. I told Claude to do a deep dive on the hive blockchain. Learn its nooks and crannies, leave no stone unturned. lol…i dont know if Claude really listened…but seemed so 😜 it even brought up the Justin Sun Origen story of hive. all this kinda played into later developments.
My first goal was showing myself that with Claude i could make an idea work on the blockchain. So Claude got me all connected with GitHub, we forked the chain for testing. and we started laying out an idea i have thought would be helpful for year. Just a way to sort new post from new users. I was saying in the start…i want to make a little plankton pond. a place where you can go and know that every post you see is by a user profile that is 1 year or younger. So that was the first baby step. creating that feed and giving it the name at the top to click into.
Basecamp wants to aide the new user experience as well as bring a gamification component to curating, discovery and keeping the chain safe. Basecamp surfaces brand new accounts posts in a feed and provides both quick visual and investigative tools to help determine if they should support or engage with this new users post.
New users are given simple checklists that fill out a ring, these checklists can be done fast or slow. New users are asked their interests and helps match them with people willing to guide, and tries to make the whole thing feel less like homework and more like somewhere you would actually want to poke around and meet people.
I am not a developer. I do not write code. I have done this entirely through Claude, one prompt at a time, getting things wrong, staring at what broke, and trying again.
I did this for 3 weeks using my pro Claude account. But i was hitting my limits constantly. lol. I actually had real things i was doing in my life that i also need Claude for so i was stuck, working on my hive ideas for a few days, then my real life projects. Balancing back and forth until i saw @Acidyo and his dhf proposal for a more transparent subscription program..to Claude code for the community if they applied. I thought that seemed exactly up my alley. I wanted it to all be collaborative and for the benefit of hive finding Thrive… so i would apply and give best shot at a Claude Max subscription. i sent 
So here i am now…deep in the thick of the messy middle, not a launch. I am posting where im at now, unfinished, on purpose. Im ready for any troll comments. and even more ready for any constructive criticism…or maybe more than anything im ready for some YES, AND spirit.
I had several game ideas in my head… that i knew would be best for a Claude Max kung-fu chop. and boom thats where i started. making a little game i called BUGGER
A matrix-style wall of falling digits with a little bug crawling through them, landing only on the 0s and 1s to stay safe. Start small. My boy helped me on this one…the P-man was happy to be my video game guinea pig.
Here you see it in a rough first pass. If you want you can play the 6 or 7th version here. I find Bugger almost like a squishy toy…its hypnotic in its simplicity.
https://hivebugger.netlify.app/
Think this was 6th or 7th iteration… It is still a proof and the current version mechanic works, you can skip right to level 5 if your brave. While its not a finished thing, im happy with its playability already. But that has been my method so far. Get something you can click, then argue with it until it is good enough. Thats when i move on…as i can always circle back.
I moved on to another game…my bigger picture game, i was talking too my son about designing another game…he was talking about hopping over thing and how he wanted the play to move…he said something and it made me think of an overall blockchain web. I had imagined a game that could also be used as a front end, a way to navigate the blockchain but in a gamified action adventure exploration style game. Basically Zelda, but you were interacting with the hive blockchain. I ordered Claude code to think simple. To think of every button on hive.blog as being a clickable entity in the game. I asked it to use real hive lore and find fun connections. I demanded it remain easy and functional and light. Modular, building blocks layered. Never loose track of the goal being an SDK that any front end could utilize if they wanted.
lol…my naiveté led to some disappointed moments. But i always found a new way. Banging that head against the wall. Sharing ideas and images and talking about game lore and connections to hive…over and over, slowly but surely a game began to form. I wanted to focus first on the layout and how you moved and how you got in and out of the map and i discovered little things like anything encountered in the game could be clicked and it would open a new tab…thus allowing you to return to the main tab at any point and be right back where you left the game. Giving people to walk and move through the game at there own speed, play it fast or play it slow. A gamified front end for exploring the Hive Universe. Here you see some of the things i was feeding Claude the world got created.
Hive's own logo rendered as molten glass. This i fed later on as i thought it should represent the topography of the map. I was speaking to Claude about texture and using words like globular 🤣 now that vibe coding baby.
I was not asking for copies. I was hunting for a way to move through a world that actually meant something once you connected it to Hive. Decentralized networks. Nodes joined by lines. Hopping from point to point instead of walking in a straight line. If the way you move quietly echoes how Hive itself is built, that is lore for free. Not decoration. The theme doing double duty.
This is where the node idea turned into something you could travel around in. Real Hive account names scattered across a dark field as the dots you hop between. A little red diamond in the middle, that is you. but it played like shit. to hard to turn and go down a new line.
This was the map view. Was rough, it didnt feel like what i was asking for from Claude.
From here thought it grew…slowly taking shape.. i started calling it Hive Frontend Universe. I knew it wasnt the final name.. im now flirting with the name H.I.V.E.R.
This gameification of the front end wasn’t just for newcomer accounts, i am working toward a fun new way to explore the blockchain. I’m surprising myself as i go along. The whole idea roots in hive.blog and denser as being the way to leverage Posts, Search, Welcome, the Arcade, Sign Up, the Developer Portal, the Whitepaper, Communities, all as part of game play and lore. All of it rendered as landmarks you travel to and find.
The game is Live posts from real people, pulled from the chain in 30 minute windows, a chain snapshot every 30 minutes sets up the new game play. Real data is pulled to generate pulsing Jsons throughout the game, the game has scammers, spammers, extractors, bots, sockpuppets. And the evil villain, The Mighty Emporor J Sun…who wants to horde all the resources and drain the reward pool. Meanwhile 21 citadel witnesses look over the chain, pulsing and protecting the land of HIVE. So every 30 minutes the world reweaves itself around whatever the hive blockchain has been doing and the community can walk around in that snap shot in a game form.
Shots of the map in formation, i was very frustrated at points in these days. Visually it was not coming out like i wanted. But i kept prompting and fixing. And telling Claude it better not be giving me dog shit code. I often told it that important devs would look at this code and that he better not be giving me slop… i told him we would catch him if he didnt make good, clean, effective code. I told it..to not take the green path and if it was bullshitting me, it would get caught. I thought some passive aggression might help the equation. I think Claude started doing better after i started threatening it. 😎
Here is the part I am still a little amazed worked. The ground you are standing on is the Hive logo. Eroded into terrain so it reads as land up close, and only resolves into the mark when you pull the map all the way out. It glows red like backlit glass. Roads of different colors and thicknesses cross the whole thing like a subway map, some routes matter more than others, and the landmarks wear the real logos of the real Hive projects they point to. You can wonder around collecting little JSON tokens and avoiding the scammer, extractors,bots and sock puppets. Or you can just use the map and hop around the tools on Hive.blog.
It’s still really crude. But im kinda pleased with the slow steady progression turning more and more into the gamified frontend universe that i imagined.
You can zoom into any live post and it is a real person's actual profile picture, ringed with little signals about who they are, with a card that pops up so you can decide whether to go say hello.
I am also messing with collectibles, little helmets and tokens scattered around, though I will be honest, I do not have a clean answer yet for what tokens are actually for once you grab them. That part is still open. These bits live in my experimental builds, not the deployable version yet. I am showing you the sketchbook, not the finished furniture.
I did not want to invent a bunch of homework mythology. Hive already has a real story, so the game just names it.
The world was made by builders who left the code open and walked away. Nobody owns the middle. Every account carries three virtues in some mix. Power, which is your stake. Wisdom, which is curation. Courage, which is just posting, putting yourself out there, the newcomer's virtue. A heart that is all power and nothing else is exactly how you spot a bad account, and it is also how villains get made.
Which brings me to the villain. The old world was bought by an almighty evil emperor who believed power was the only thing that mattered, and who seized the twenty one thrones by stuffing them with sock puppets. The people could not out-buy him, so they did the bravest thing in chain history. They carried the entire world away and left him ruling an empty shell.
His name in the game is Emperor J Son.
If you were around in 2020 you know exactly who that is. If a maintainer ever gets nervous, his name lives in a single line of text and changes in one word. He owned the stake. He never owned us.
His leftover sock puppets still drift through the world as the enemies you learn to spot, which is the same skill Basecamp is really trying to teach newcomers in the first place. There are annoying little critters called Blahs too, that you cannot flag away, because where they come from there is no downvote. its a world where everyone blurts about and they come back to spam all the beauty out of Hive Land…
None of this is locked down. The games are half built. The map is still shifting and finding it final form.. I am making calls on feel and instinct more than any spec, and some of what you see in these shots is from prototypes ahead of the real committed code. What I know for sure is that I want this to be something any Hive frontend could pick up and use, not something that only lives on hive.blog because I built it there first. It is meant to be shared. It stays open source the whole way. The code is on GitHub right now, anyone can look.
If someone thinks my version is stupid but likes a piece of it and makes it better, that is a win, not a loss. That is the entire point.
Tell me where I am wrong. Honest pushback. If something here looks half baked or headed the wrong way, say so in the comments. I would rather hear it now than after.
If you have vibe coding tips. I’m all ears. I actually thought it could be fun to set up a vibe-code-athon and we could all see what others are doing and share tips.
The code is on GitHub right now. Anyone can read it, and if you build things, you can clone it and run it yourself: https://github.com/mybuttcoins/denser/tree/feat/basecamp-activity-rings-and-games
Im very interested in hearing from anyone already working with onboarding…id love to voltron ideas together.
Anyway…i have pretty thick skin…so say whatever you think..ill listen or i wont. 🤟
Thanks for reading the messy middle.
If you are more of a visual person..shortly ill put out a video showing movement around Basecamp and Hive Frontend Universe. Or maybe H.I.V.E.R. Or maybe you have a better name. This post is rewarded by 
