What would you expect from a cat focused community?
We started the Hive Cats community a little over six years ago in an attempt to provide a community that could aggregate cat related content on Hive in the absence of a more effective form of content discovery.
Given that "cats" is one of the most popular and most searched topics online, it only made sense that Hive would have a dedicated cat channel.
Of course, one of the challenges on Hive is that in order for a topic-specific community to actually work, users have to be willing to post their relevant content to the community.
And that's a surprisingly difficult ask because a lot of people just want to send all their posts to specific communities where — perhaps — they either know whale-sized curators, or feel they have the best chance of getting seen by whale-sized curators.
One of the "weaknesses" of Hive's community set-up is that there's no community owner option to — for example — configure the community in such a way that certain tags, like #cat #cats #kitten #kittens #caturday would automatically appear in the community's feed, regardless of where they were originally posted.
That would be the ideal world.
But we don't live in an ideal world, and there's the additional wrinkle that not everyone necessarily uses a cat related tag if they share pictures or stories about cats. Maybe they'll use #pets or #animals or something else.
We have the ability to set up "recommended tags" as part of the configuration, but that takes place from within the community, meaning that users have to find their way here, in the first place.
The long workaround might be to manually seek out all the cat related content we can find, and reblog it to the community.
In the past, we published a weekly "collection" of cat posts, and we may resume doing so until a better option presents itself. The "problem" with it was that curated collections only (at the time) displayed properly if viewed from the PeakD front end, but looked like a jumble elsewhere.
So we return to the question: What do people really want from a cat community?
Please do leave us a comment and share your thoughts!