So last night I went to the Open Relationship Nashville holiday party and spoke with a friend who has been studying coding and webmastery and is in the process of trying to develop an alternative site for the Poly-Geekery group on Wastebook. It is a gigantic community, globally active, dedicated to polyamory and every imaginable type of fandom as well. It is truly a delight to behold.
Got to snog her too, but that's beside the point. #itwastotallythepoint #butidigress
I've been trying to find a way to get more friends, especially among the interest groups that I'm a part of on Wastebook to give the Steem ecosystem a glance. I wasn't sure precisely how to go about it, due to both the difficulty/time necessary to get on the blockchain as of right now, and also due to there not being a very good interface for groups. There is no "in-group" forum functionality, for instance.
Steem groups exist primarily on discord, and while discord is already used by many in the Polygeekery communities, (largely due to Wastebook's iron-boot style of content blocking) it's not at all the same, for better and worse. Being primarily a chat/voice application, it's not exactly a posting platform, link-dropping be damned..
And considering the dozens, if not hundreds, of sub-groups beneath the Poly-Geekery flag, all of which are posted to quite frequently, at all hours of the day and night, the idea of something like Engrave, which is soon launching a functionality specifically for groups; in which a primary editor (who owns the wallet) and then sub-editors/contributors are catered for... That's good stuff. I'm very interested to see precisely how robust this functionality truly is.
Also, it appears as if Engrave has sub-forums built into it, though I'm not sure precisely how far it scales. I'll learn more as I badger the @wise-team discord over the course of coming days.
Finally, the Steemfounders project, wherein a prospective steemian can effectively buy their account on credit (via audition process) is very interesting, and I'm certainly looking forward to learning more about that process.
The interface looks clean and intuitive. I'm by no means a weblord, but so far so good. The post editor contains all the markdown tools familiar to those who use Steempeak, which is my primary front-end at this time.
My one and only negative criticism is that it appears to have a baked-in 15% fee on posts published through Engrave. Even though I routinely donate 5% of my post rewards to Steempeak because I -really- want to see them succeed, 15% is staggeringly high from my point of view. I suspect that it's due to data-crunching costs necessary to fund Steemfounders and maintain an interface designed for groups, and if that's the case, then I'll certainly be more amenable to that fee. Time will tell.
Now to post it, and see what we get.
Love to the Loving,
Silas Danois