It's official! 18 months in the making and LeoThreads has officially hit production status. If you're reading this post, then using Hive will never be the same from this moment forward.
Now you can use https://leofinance.io to create microblogs!
If you're familiar with LeoFinance as a project and LeoTeam, then you'll know that we've been talking about LeoThreads for literally 1.5 years. It's been a long road to get here and the path has been far from linear.
You see, it wasn't just about releasing LeoThreads to the Hive and LeoFinance community, it was about building key infrastructure that would make Microblogging both feasible and good.
LeoInfra, LeoLightning DB, LeoMobile... All of these developments were designed with the goal of microblogging in the future. We built up each of these projects throughout the past several months with that ambition in mind.
Get out there and get Threading: https://leofinance.io/threads
A Cohesive Ecosystem
Whether you look at LEO, LeoInfra, LeoLightning, LeoMobile or even CUB and POLYCUB... LeoFinance aims to build a cohesive Web3 Ecosystem. Everything we build has a long-term purpose in mind.
Our core KPI is to grow LeoFinance's Monthly Active Users (MAUs).
In the latest @leo.stats report, @dalz showed that we had 511 MAUs who posted from the LeoFinance.io interface.
We also had 218 accounts that didn't post at all but who actively made comments throughout the month of July.
August has arrived and so has LeoThreads. Can we grow the MAUs from 729 to over 1k?
Personally, I expect MAUs to double. I think we'll see that number of accounts creating comments (but not posts) skyrocket from 218 to 700+.
The future is in Microblogging. Look to Twitter. Look even to Tik Tok. The world of social media has moved from long-form to short-form content and it's time we learn how to adopt that move and incorporate it into the Leo Lifestyle.
There will ALWAYS be a place for long-form content. In fact, we still expect that to be the backbone of the ecosystem.
That being said, short-form gives us a way to interact and share stuff with each other on a daily basis.
One thing many people on Hive have talked about is how much activity there is across all of the different Hive discord servers.
I've seen countless times that people wished that activity happened on-chain. For the first time ever, that activity CAN happen on-chain and it can happen through a fast, free and intuitive experience called LeoThreads.
LeoThreads
What is LeoThreads?
LeoThreads is microblogging on Hive. A thread is our equivalent to a "Tweet".
Now, there is also something called "Thread" on Twitter which essentially refers to a string of Tweets combined together.
On LeoThreads, a Thread = a Tweet and it also refers to multiple "Threads" strung together as replies beneath the parent.
What makes LeoThreads Different?
Creating a Thread on LeoFinance.io is not like creating a post. When you create a Thread, it actually creates a "second-level" piece of content on the Hive blockchain.
This means that it DOES NOT create a top-level Hive Post from your account.
There exists a massive issue on Hive when it comes to content quality, downvoting and overall discussion of rewards.
LeoFinance side-stepped this in a lot of ways by having the LEO token be the primary form of rewards on LeoFinance.io.
That being said, top-level posts (posts on Hive) will always be subject to policing in the Hive rewards pool. People don't agree with people posting a picture of a cat and earning $5.
LeoThreads doesn't create top-level posts... It creates "second-level posts" AKA comments.
How?
How does it do this? A lengthy explanation of the backend could be inserted here but why bother? We've spent so many months building out infrastructure like Lightning and LeoInfra to be able to handle a scalable setup for Microblogging.
Engagement
You may have noticed a sudden increase in attention given to commenting on LeoFinance over the past few months. @taskmaster4450 led some initiatives, @khaleelkazi led some initiatives as well.
Commenting is a huge part of being on LeoFinance. In fact, the LeoFinance community is the most active community on Hive in terms of comments.
LeoThreads utilizes comments as the microblogging post infrastructure. This means that when a new account comes in and creates a Thread, they are actually creating a comment and that user gets added to our MAUs - that list of 218 unique monthly accounts who comment from LeoFinance but don't create blog posts.
We're excited to see how engagement grows from this.
LEO Token
How does this benefit the LEO token? This is an interesting and multi-fold discussion. In fact, I had this discussion yesterday: what's the point of investing so many resources in building things like this for LeoFinance? Afterall, does it really generate enough revenue to be wortwhile?
We've talked about ad revenue in the past. Ad revneue is definitely a key part of the equation but Monthly Active Users are really the core focus. Growing MAUs will lead to signficant growth opportunities now and in the future.
In terms of revenue, from privately testing LeoThreads with a group of 4 people, we've already seen about a 5-10% increase in average daily ad revenue.
The new LeoAds model was unveiled a few months ago and this model is set to go live in the near future. The LeoAds program generates several thousands of dollars per month at current MAUs.
If we double our MAUs, how will LeoAds perform? How much LEO will it buy off the market each month?
Now imagine if our current and future MAUs are using Microblogging - the page views, ad views and ad clicks skyrocket because there are more frequent ads and every Thread you view has more ads on it.
Threads give us way more site throughput in terms of users clicking through to different pages on the UI. It's truly incredible and we can't wait to see the impact it has.
LeoThreads Open Beta
Now that we've teed this up nicely, it's time to unveil LeoThreads Open Beta.
LeoThreads is a familiar experience to using Twitter. That's really what we were going for. As you can see, this is the Desktop UI.
The mobile UI - using leofinance.io's web app on mobile - also looks amazing. The mobile UI is not perfect but it definitely is functional and allows anyone to use LeoThreads on the go.
Obviously LeoMobile - our native Android and IOS app - has a MASSIVE update on the way. We wanted to roll this out to desktop and mobile web app first before rolling out LeoThreads on LeoMobile natively in the app stores. Once that is ready, it will radically change your experience of using Hive and LeoFinance on-the-go.
The LeoThreads UI
Let's jump into a few key pieces of the LeoThreads UI. I'm going to keep this brief as I want the UI to do all the talking once you're on it.
What you see above is the https://leofinance.io/threads homepage. This is where you'll go to see all the recent and trending LeoThreads that have been posted.
- This is the navigation button to switch between blogs and microblogs
- Sorting has 2 options - recent and trending - the UI defaults to showing recent which simply shows the most recent Threads that have been created
- This is the "Create a Thread" button that allows you to create a new Thread post - again, this creates a COMMENT, not a top-level Hive post!
- This is what a Thread looks like. This particular thread is simply some quick text and a link to a Coindesk article about Bitcoin. Threads can be whatever you want them to be. Want to post a picture of a cat or a chart? Do it. Want to post an article link, do it. Want to post your thoughts on the hive price, do it. Anything goes. Use Threads the same way you would use Twitter
- LEO Tokenomics - we have this in other places on the UI, it shows liquid, staked and LP'd LEO out there
- Trending topics show the latest trending #hashtags on LeoThreads. You can (and should) use #hashtags when posting a Thread in order to index it and categorize it to get noticed, upvoted and engaged with
- LeoAds are displayed in a few locations throughout LeoThreads, on desktop, there are ads on the left-hand side of the UI
- This is the notification center - we revamped this to handle LeoThreads so you can quickly and easily see who is responding to your threads
When you click on a Thread, you'll see it open the full page for that specific thread. Anyone who has replied to it will appear beneath it (very similar to Twitter).
You can reply to the parent thread or you can even reply to one of the replies by clicking on one of those Threads or the "Reply button" in the bottom left corner of each Thread.
When you click the "Reply" button on anywhere in the UI, it shows a little popout. This makes it RIDICULOUSLY easy to quickly reply to a bunch of different Threads. It's super cool and super fun. I found it easy to make 10 thread replies in under a minute. It's really amazing.
Curation and Rules for LeoThreads
There really aren't any. Use LeoThreads as you would use Twitter. There are some obvious things that you shouldn't post on LeoThreads and the LeoFinance Community/Curators have the ability to remove malicious actors. Outside of that, if you want to post pictures of cats, have at it.
LeoFinance will always skew toward crypto and finance talk but unlike top-level posts, we don't care what you post on Threads. Post anything and everything.
Use LeoThreads like Twitter! Share your Hive articles to get them more exposure, send out messages and tag other Hive users so they jump in and respond. Have conversations. Share random thoughts about the market.
We can't wait to see what you - the user - come up with in terms of utilizing threads in your daily life!
In terms of curation - curation works the same for Threads as it does for comments (since Threads are actually comments at the Hive blockchain level).
You can Curate threads however you like. They can earn both HIVE and LEO rewards like any other comment can! You can also downvote Threads if you think someone is getting way to much LEO or HIVE on it. That's all up to Community Curation.
Go Out There and Enjoy!
There is so much to talk about with LeoThreads. We are just so excited to finally have this ready for the community. Please get out there and make some Threads!
Our Goal: 20,000 Threads (Comments) today on LeoFinance. Let's DO IT!
PSA
Public Service Announcement: LeoThreads is entering Open Beta status. There WILL be bugs. There will be scalability issues. Please plan for it and be ready for it.
If you find bugs, please report them in our Discord server using the #bug-report automated reporting system. This helps our team quickly find and fix bugs.
No new technology ever worked flawlessly. Closed Beta - our group of 4 testers - found so many bugs and we fixed them all. They've been using Threads for over a week now with no bugs and that's pretty incredible.
That being said, anything can happen once you move from 4 testers to 400 testers.
We'll be working hard to fix and bugs as they appear and people report them. LeoThreads will slowly be migrated from Open Beta to full-scale production release (non-beta status) over the coming weeks as we bug test on a large scale.
Thank you 🦁
About LeoFinance
LeoFinance is a blockchain-based Web3 community that builds innovative applications on the Hive, BSC, ETH and Polygon blockchains. Our flagship application: LeoFinance.io allows users and creators to engage and share content on the blockchain while earning cryptocurrency rewards.
Our mission is to put Web3 in the palm of your hands.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FinanceLeo
Discord: https://discord.gg/E4jePHe
Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.leofinance.io
Our Hive Applications
Join Web3: https://leofinance.io/
LeoMobile (IOS): https://testflight.apple.com/join/cskYPK1a
LeoMobile (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.leofi.mobile
Delegate HIVE POWER: Earn 16% APR, Paid Daily. Currently @ 2.8M HP
Hivestats: https://hivestats.io
LeoDex: https://leodex.io
LeoFi: https://leofi.io
Polygon HBD (pHBD): https://wleo.io/hbd
Polygon HIVE (pHIVE): https://wleo.io/hive
Web3 & DeFi
Web3 is about more than social media. It encompasses a personal revolution in financial awareness and data ownership. We've merged the two with our Social Apps and our DeFi Apps:
CubFinance (BSC): https://cubdefi.com
PolyCUB (Polygon): https://polycub.com
Multi-Token Bridge (Bridge HIVE, HBD, LEO): https://wleo.io