This guide assumes you know how to backup and secure cryptographic private keys/wallets.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or a recommendation to invest in HIVE. Many of the trade-offs necessary to make an attempt at decentralized social media have made this network unsuitable for use as money. However these tradeoffs provide best-available censorship resistance at a time when it is badly needed. There is no Layer 2 option on the horizon. This is working now.
D.Buzz
A “Twitter” interface for hive chain. There are some basic features missing at this time (dms, RT's) but being added quickly- consider it early access. There is no app yet but the mobile web UI is good. A great team is building this who is very free speech oriented, though it’s not open source just yet- There are plans for this once it gets a bit further. Like all http endpoints, they could censor here if they chose. I can give my personal endorsement that I don’t think it’s an issue with the dbuzz team, of course the wise ones worry about the future so let’s examine the platform.
"Buzzes" are written to the hive blockchain, your posts are as immutable as any tx there. As you might expect, it’s less censorship resistant than Bitcoin. Hive is a DPoS consensus protocol, where staked coins (Hive Power) vote on validators. Top 21 wins. Problems with this system is a whole post in itself, I actually find it less hard than other forms of PoS- but I am not trying to sell you on the future of finance here, just the future of social media. Also, D.buzz administrators can “mute” posts which does not remove them from the chain, but carries a tag so that most front ends will likely not display it.
Regardless of how dbuzz feels about your posts however, your content is written to chain and visible from other interfaces:
/trending/hive-193084
created/hive-193084
You could tweet from a hive wallet command line if you have the skills. Just point it at the dapp “community”.
D.Buzz is an interface for a hive blockchain community/channel/subreddit. You can use any interface to read/write to it. There is little real capacity to ban you, certainly not if you run a p2p node locally. While the dbuzz interface is not presently open source, once they do open it you will be able to run a copy locally and point it at any node you like, including your own.
All 21 validators must conspire to attempt to censor you. Possible, but not without effort. Attacking is less costly than PoW but still not free, and some very powerful attacks may require human intervention.
I don’t want to seem too negative here- timestamping the deluge of text that is social media is likely the most demanding task you can ask of a blockchain. Even LBRY centralizes their comments. There is no getting away from the problem. However, for all its flaws, I do believe it’s quite better than kicking the can down the road to parler which is already under attack, or playing whack-a-mole on federated gab/mastodon/bitcoinhackers. A method for forking-away from an overwhelmingly powerful attacker has already been demonstrated, creates a full duplication of the network and audience, and is cheaper than the cost of attacking. This isn’t a holy grail maybe, but- it’s a substantially more powerful tool than available alternatives. If you are successfully attacked like STEEM was (which involved premine abuse) you fork away with the database and do not have to start over.
How to Use it
It’s account-based. You get to select a named @ handle rather than generating a hash. Interacting with the chain (Posting, commenting,likes/up/downvoting) requires expending Resource Credits that recharge over time. There are a lot of moving parts that determine your maximum, recharge rate, and how much things cost, but right now you can comment daily for holding about 50 cents. A portion of the block rewards is given to users for posting and curating and staked hive accrues some small interest, and Hive Power can be delegated to other users. It’s common for new accounts to be delegated Hive Power for a time so most users should be able to get in and interact normally for free and build up permanent HP never paying a satoshi. This is an uncapped supply coin, so this might be sustainable as well- with some demand spike hiccups.
HBD is a chain native stablecoin based on oracle data from the validators. Don’t hold that either.
New accounts must be created from existing accounts. There are numerous dapps/faucets/entities that will generate one for you, or you can get one from someone with enough HP to claim accounts.
Some are phone-only, some are email-only, some just want to be paid for it. The most easily anonymous way I was able to think to create one would be with a throwaway email verified through ecency.com, there may be other ways. The Ecency app is nice as well.
Try to keep the eyebrows down on these next few steps- remember this is social media not money
Your account generator will generate and send you a set of keys. Yes, private ones. You only need the password. IMMEDIATELY go to https://wallet.hive.blog and click on reset password.
Your password is essentially your master private key. Resetting this will regenerate the other keys. Use it as little as possible, and use the key with the least permissions necessary to do what you want to do.
You can see what the keys are for on the keys & permissions page and most apps requiring only the posting key is one reason it’s a little better than pasting your private key into websites. The fact that you’re copying them all out of a website is another problem but hey, this is a social media account. Didn’t I tell you not to buy it? You can probably get a little more hardcore with this using a CLI wallet but your account will still have to come from somewhere or someone.
IMPORTANT: Whoever made your account can reset your password and take possession of your account. If you’re onboarding a normie, having that recovery account- normally set to the app they made the account through- can let them fix things in the more traditional way via email/phone and will be comfortable leaving this alone. Crypto people will perhaps want to follow this guide:
@deathwing/psa-change-your-recovery-account-now
You can set it to yourself to make your account unrecoverable. Make sure to do this if you used a throwaway for account generation.
Some dapps like peakd.com use a OAUTH service known as hivesigner, to even further limit the number of times you have to dish out a key. You can revoke permission for any dapp to use your keys as well- both from hivesigner like revoking traditional OAUTH but dapp permission to use your keys is also on-chain data and can be revoked there as well. There is also a “metamask-style" browser plugin.
Brigading crews
Hive is a public blockchain. Users are free to put on a crown, brigade and downvote you as spam. It’s important to note that downvotes only affect potential block rewards, and some dapps may choose to use it in their front-end ranking algos. There is nothing they can do to stop you from talking, or others listening. I don’t think many Bitcoiners care if they get their tweet-pennies. They can’t turn you off.