tl;dr let's add something to the name while keeping Hive as an abbreviation
The world is abuzz with hives
I'm posting this today because I hope rebranding will be discussed informally at @hivefest 8. While we have an epic story and a powerful logo, it's hard to point people to our platform by simply telling them to go to Hive. We all know it's not a very unique name. There's a social media app called Hive Social and a mining company called Hive Blockchain. Basically everybody who works with groups of people, whether they are self-organizing or not, or with networks or hexagonal structures, will have considered using a hive-related name, while there are also plenty of beekeepers who use the word literally.
Of course, the popularity does confirm that it's an attractive name. I'm not blaming the people who had to come up with something quickly, while there were a thousand other issues to take care of while forking away from Steem in March 2020. I remember that @roelandp said he proposed spelling the name as Hiive. I'd have preferred that, but it wouldn't have been distinctive enough. In any case, changing the spelling or choosing a completely different name now would be too disruptive. As far as I know, Hive documentation still uses the name steem in many places. I looked into it two years ago, but gave up even logging the issue completely.
During the fork, interface projects such as SteemPeak (@peakd) and Esteem (@ecency) wisely decided they didn't want their name to be tied to the name of the blockchain anymore. While this was understandable from their perspective, it increased the confusion for new users.
The branding issue became more urgent recently. As you know, centralized social media are going through a crisis, and Twitter and Reddit in particular are openly in conflict with a large section of their most active users. While trying to tell people that there's a social media platform that can't be taken over by a dictator with random mood swings, it was annoying that I couldn't simply identify it by mentioning Hive. As if explaining a blockchain-based platform isn't complicated enough.
In a list of Reddit alternatives, Hive is identified as hive.blog, which is necessary for clarity, but will lead users to a website which hasn't been redesigned since 2016 (although it looks better than Old Reddit, if you ask me). And of course, the name is misleading because Hive is used for much more than blogging these days.
Hive is always a party
I'm not in Rosarito, and I don't have time to watch the conference talks, but I did enjoy meeting many of you at Hivefest 7 in Amsterdam last year. Since I received a few extra Hive and Hivefest stickers, I put them on my car and my city bike, among other things. At first I wondered why I was promoting a conference that happens once a year. Is flying around the world to attend booze-fueled conferences really the purpose of crypto, as cynics would suggest? But then I realized Hivefest is a better name in a way, because it's easier to Google for someone who wondered what it was. And the result would give positive vibes too. (I know promotion doesn't work so directly; the purpose of stickers is to made Hive look familiar when people hear about it later. But that's beside the point.)
FINALLY TO THE POINT THEN: This gave me the big lightbulb above my head that we could ask @roelandp to adopt Hivefest as the new name for the Hive platform and community, while changing the name of the conference to Hivefest Party or something like that. The advantage compared to a complete rebranding would be that we could keep using Hive as the name for the blockchain and the currency, as well as in other brand names that include the word Hive.
Now this was just the origin of the proposal. I don't want to advocate any suggestion in particular. My talent is coming up with ideas, not making decisions. I'll discuss other options below, before considering how to choose a new name as a decentralized community.
Repurposing existing Hive brands
Besides Hivefest, there are a number of HiveSomething brand names which all happen to represent a general service to the community: HiveBuzz, Hive-Engine, HiveVote and HiveHub. I hope we could persuade one of these projects to give up their name for the greater good. This would have the advantage of avoiding a race to claim domain names. On the other hand, I understand it's a sensitive issue to use an existing name, both for the people running these projects and others.
By the way, with regard to the planned LeoFinance rebranding, I might be out of the loop. Will a new name be announced this weekend? It would be possible to change it to LeoSomething, but @khaleelkazi indicated it wasn't a priority to stick to something familiar. While LeoFinance has many moving parts, there aren't as many different parties involved as for the whole Hive ecosystem.
New compound names
There are a ton of compound names which are already used but on a small scale. We could steamroll these innocent internet users easily. For example, such names include Wehive/Mehive/Behive. Rarely used names include HiveStreet, HiveSquare, Hivelane, HiveOpen, StakeHive and VoteHive. For others, here's a list of what I found in search engine results:
- DHive: a Hive repo is already ranking via npm.js and Github
- Hivenest: used by an obscure company and a few hobbyists
- Hivedive: unfunded SaaS company
- Hivepeers (Google: Did you mean hivepress?)
- Hi-Hive, a small community
- HiveHi, a rare Indian name (Google: Did you mean Dhivehi?)
- HiveHive - we're already on the first page
- Hiveline: makes no sense, but it sounds right.
Are there any other random compounds like Hiveline that come to mind?
Not recommended
Several other options are too crowded with competing users in my opinion:
- Hivenet: cloud computing
- Hivetime: bee-themed sim game
- HiveSwarm: already used for Apache Hive
- OpenHive: too many honey-related uses
- HiveLive, LiveHive, HiveLife, LifeHive
Is there a less obvious pun on live/life we could use? I'd avoid 'thrive', which is a beautiful concept, but difficult to pronounce or understand for non-native English speakers.
Translation
Another approach would be to use a translation of the word 'hive'. While I'm a translator myself, I wouldn't recommend this method either. I think the connection would be unclear. And these names would still be fairly common. However, this would give us the opportunity to adopt a fresh new name, still linked to Hive. For your information, here's a list of words for 'beehive' that sound nice to me in various languages, from Google Translate, written as one word:
- Fengxiang (Chinese)
- Bikube (Danish)
- Abelujo (Esperanto)
- Anyiwo (Ewe)
- Ruche (French)
- Kudanzuma (Hausa)
- Zibmu (Hmong)
- Sarang (Indonesian/Malay)
- Hachinosu (Japanese)
- Inzuki (Kinyrwanda)
- Alvearium (Latin)
- Avilys (Lithuanian)
- Tranon-tantely (Malagasi)
- Ofagapi (Samoan)
- Matlo-a-Linotsi (Sesotho)
- Mivada (Sinhalese)
- Colmena (Spanish)
Maybe someone can find inspiration for their own project name here.
Me presenting at Hivefest 7 (a still from the video feed)
Consensus
Now the hard part is agreeing and deciding as decentralized community. I didn't discuss this with anyone beforehand; I'm not a good politician. I'm asking Hivefest attendees to discuss this informally, since it's challenging to reach agreement on naming issues in public. While witnesses will be listened to as leading members of the Hive community, but they don't need to get involved this time if they don't want to. Whatever happens, they'll keep extending the Hive blockchain by running the hived software. What we'd be renaming is Hive as a community, and as a platform, which I see as a rather fluid constellation of services.
Update 25 October 2023: I was too pessimistic about the power of individual community members to change the name. Hive will be called whatever we call it. I think we should have polls about possible new names, although it's unlikely that a single poll will be decisive.
Everybody is free to say "What you're referring to as Hive, is in fact DPOS/Hive". But realistically, this approach hasn't been effective for GNU/Linux. Assuming that hive.io and hive.blog will remain neutral, it'll be up to the owners of the largest interfaces (apps/websites) to decide what to call Hive, in consultation with their users. Two to five or the largest projects could make a choice that everyone else will have to go along with, in order to be understood. I'm sure they won't have the intention to impose their own preference. And I'm smart enough not to name names here. 😁
Personal notes
Somewhat related: since I'm obviously interested in naming things, I maintain a list of nerdy naming schemes, i.e. lists of existing names that you might use in case you need to name a lot of things randomly, as a gamer, sysadmin or developer.
What Hive means to me, in short (yes, I can keep it short):
https://twitter.com/apertamono/status/1692954280188096797
- apertamono
You can hire me as a marketing expert, both for strategy reports like this post and for social media content. I don't have a website for this part of my business yet, but you can read about my experience and find my contact info on https://blockchain-translator.com/
Stock images are from Pixabay (GoranH & PollyDot)