If you were around the web and internet in the early days you may remember when a lot of innovation was driven by individuals or small groups. I can remember when IMDb was a list passed around usenet. I would see updates via a bulletin board (BBS) I was on so people could download it to have on their computer. CDDB was another project that collected information on CDs so that people could download the track lists for CDs they ripped. Both became corporate products that placed restrictions on how the data could be used. There have been many other cases. As the web evolved people realised the value of data and would form companies from the start for their projects. This happened with what became the big social sites, although many still struggled to make money. The massive infrastructure and staff they required would eat money. Recently we have seen Elon Musk buy Twitter for a massive sum and he is trying to make some of that back by charging for various features and bumping up the price of accessing the data. Now Reddit have changed their API licencing and this is causing a big kerfuffle.
Meanwhile some people are trying to build alternative models. I know a few people here used identi.ca which provided a lot of the same facilities of Twitter, but was more open. Evan Prodromou was the guy behind that and he built protocols that allowed such systems to work across multiple independent servers that could still interact. This is the Fediverse, a network of federated servers. The best known implementation of this is Mastodon which has seen massive growth since the Twitter takeover. It may still be small in comparison, but hundreds of thousands have migrated. Many will be technical people looking for some of the old flavour of social media, but I have also seen many LGBTQ+ people there who may feel Twitter is less hospitable to some parts of society.
Hive ought to have gained from this exodus too, but if it has then it has not been as significant. The fact that some went to a Twitter clone called Hive.Social probably caused some to end up here by accident. Very few on Twitter are even aware of our Hive.
Hive and the Fediverse have some things in common. Both are decentralised and largely open source, but each Fediverse instance is run by someone who can set their own rules. They can opt to ban accounts who break those rules and may not federate to instances which they find incompatible with their ideals. Trump's Truth.Social actually runs a version of the same software, but I believe it is pretty isolated. You can even run your own private instance, but I hear it needs a hefty machine. Public instances may request donations to pay their running costs. I am on a UK one and pay a little through Patreon. Hive is more self-funding via the witness scheme and dapps can take a portion of rewards on posts they create for users.
I do prefer to use non-corporate platforms where I can. I still use last.fm to log my music listening even though it was taken over by CBS years ago. There have been some open source alternatives such as libre.fm, but I would need to make some changes to use them.
I have used Goodreads to log what I read, but that is owned by Amazon, who are not a company I particularly like. Today I learned about BookWyrm which offers similar facilities and uses the Fediverse. I may join an instance to try that. As logging is a manual process it would be simple and I may be able to import my old data.
On Mastodon I have seen a Fediverse app called Lemmy pushed as a Reddit alternative, but some say that it has privacy issues and the developer has questionable politics. That article is itself on another reddit alternative that I had not heard of.
I wonder if Hive could be filling some of these niches better. I think Steemit was named to suggest similarity to Reddit and it does a pretty good job of hosting those sort of conversations, but with many more facilities. I have found a lot of hostility to blockchain on Mastodon. It gets dismissed along with NFTs and the latest 'AI' as scammy, but we know Hive is better than most crypto.
I do not know if Hive could integrate with the Fediverse. Would it even be accepted there? I have wondered if it could host similar apps to last.fm and Goodreads, but I have not figured out how yet.
I think the people building on Hive have a lot in common with the Fediverse crowd, but there seems to be little overlap of communities so far. I am using both and I do promote Hive over there. You can find me here if you want to connect. I have found a few Hivers there already.
Selling the idea of Hive can be tricky, but I think it should definitely be promoted as an alternative to corporate platforms that are likely to change their terms and will profit from your data. I hardly use Twitter now and Facebook is a frustrating mess of ads. Hive ought to at least be a haven for those who like crypto. We need to promote it as such.
This has been a bit of a brain dump. I am interested to hear what others think about where Hive stands in the social space and if you think it has a chance. You may notice I have not mentioned rewards until now. That is a factor of course, but not the only reason people should want to be here.