I enjoy building, but I'm not great at connecting with the powerful Hive whales or a certain curation cartel. The TravelFeed community used to be the biggest travel community on Hive, but then a certain curation cartel announced that they would curate travel posts exclusively from the (then much smaller) Pinmapple community.

What a coincidence that we are both referring to the same group. :^) I get that though, I have been putting in stupid amounts of hours into the Movies & TV Shows community for years, it's always fun interacting with people and building something, but the additional side of that isn't fun, where you end up having others cross your path that are best just avoided. Especially when there are clear agendas at play that you just want nothing to do with.

It's not easy growing a dApp under these conditions and at that point we were considering moving away from Hive and becoming a traditional, centralised Web 2 platform. It took me a while to realise that the issue is not Hive itself, but rather a small number of powerful, toxic individuals. Luckily we receive support from others, most of the Hive community is great.

I do think it's a good idea to open up to other methods of sign ups, to rely entirely on Hive is so limiting. As much as I love Hive, sometimes I do feel like it's on borrowed time, where something will hammer in that nail into the coffin. Whether it's poor exchange liquidity, or price/rewards that just turns people away. But if you can figure out a way to connect web2 and Hive together then it'll be pretty beneficial. I saw you already have Google and Facebook as options, so that's already a big advantage for growth.

I like to support the projects on here that actually do something to innovate and expand on what Hive can do. Liketu is a good addition for sure. TravelFeed from what I've seen looks like one of the best. The rest? Let's be real, it's mostly just attempts to fill pockets at the expense of the users. Selling them something utterly worthless. I can't stand the Hive Engine side of things because of that. And it is just a thirst for additional power as they just repeat the cycle.

Best thing you can do is just try to ignore it all. Focus on what you want to see happen and make it. Again, looks like you've already done a good job at that! :^)

By the way, how are you with general photography on TravelFeed? A lot of my posts may not be specifically about the travelling, but often about being in a specific space and the emotions/culture/general environment. I'm not sure if you'd be alright with that sort of stuff, and would prefer what you typically see in pinmapple instead?