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First of all, a brief introduction of myself and my personal journey: my name is Federico, I found out about Bitcoin in 2015 when a famous italian gamer on YouTube mentioned it in one of his videos about the Dark Web.
I immediately wondered how such a digital currency could exist and why the government had not banned it yet (so naive if I think about it today), but that really made me get interested in economics and dig about the history of money. So much so that in November that year I bought my first BTC at 320$.
I have been a very passionate fitness athlete since 2010 but after a bad injury in the summer of 2015 and 3 months without being able to train and eat properly I was feeling like I wanted to quit everything.
I really needed a fresh start, something to get me motivated again, that's why I started a fitness YouTube channel in 2016 where I talked about my story, I set myself a goal back then: get up from the ground and participate in the national fitness show that year.
At the beginning, I just wanted to keep a video diary to help me stay focused and never really thought about making it as a fitness national influencer.
I didn't win the show but apparently, many people were fascinated about the whole story as my YouTube stats were growing fast.
The day before the competition in my hotel room: skinny, dehydrated, nervous, but motivated as hell!
That really made me completely change my mindset towards life in general, you make your own opportunities and your own destiny with the right mindset.
YouTube was going well, I had an average of 30k views a video and I was wondering what could have happened if I had quit my job entirely to focus on it completely.
But I never had the gut to do it, fortunately I should say, as my channel started to be demonetized for no reason during the YouTube 'Ad-pocalypse' purge of 2017 and I was hit with 2 strikes in a row (never used copyright music, never violated any ToS...), even after talking with the YouTube support for weeks asking them to review my case they never really told me what the reason was or ever removed the strikes and ultimately, I decided to shut down the channel myself, throwing away days of recording and editing material.
You just can't build a social media presence with a Damocles sword like that, hours and hours of work potentially destroyed on a 3rd strike that could come at any time for no reason, that's when I started to get interested in Steem.
I had a lot of fun making content there, at the beginning I was basically talking about fitness again and I was part of a now defunct community called @dtubefitness, but at the end of the day, I started to improve a lot in videomaking at every new video I put out, the feedback from the community was very positive and finally decided to become a 'lifestyle' vlogger.
I built my Steem account as if it was my own digital home, trying to put in the best I could in terms of content creation and real human interactions.
I have accumulated STEEM all the way down to 10 cents with my spare fiat and other cryptos knowing that this is much bigger than a simple blogging site.
I tend to write only in italian because I think that one day, numerous different niche communities will end up being the backbone of a much bigger ecosystem (exactly like a Hive), that's why with the help of many of my Steem italian friends I also built a community called 'Olio di Balena' entirely focused on italian content.
I'm currently running a monthly contest and always looking for curators interested in supporting creators, despite being a quite large orca myself, I believe my vote isn't enough.
When I heard that Justin Sun had bought Steemit however, I never really got that much excited about it and honestly, I had a lot of the same concerns most of the community had back then in light of this particular individual's reputation in the crypto industry.
When the takeover with the help of exchanges custodial funds took place on March the 2nd I really felt very bad about the digital home I have been building so hard for 3 years.
I suddenly wanted to push the power down button for the very first and last time in the history of my account and quit, again.
Then I saw the community rally against Justin Sun and those big exchanges and I realized, man...this is crazy...and when @yabapmatt was voted into consensus again, I got literally hit with the same wave of energy to rebuild after being knocked down on the ground for the second time again in this story.
I listened at all of those 5 hours long MSP waves chats hosted by @aggroed and @r0nd0n the last few weeks and all of the leaked conversations with Tron posted by @ausbitbank.
Then Steemit started to censor authors and posts and even if I know you can still access them on a blockchain level, nobody (especially average users) really does that just to follow their favorite authors who got censored on the front end, so I realized I cannot support a social network that destroyed the only purpose I came here for in the first place anymore.
And I still feel bad about it, because at the end of the day, I have written something like over 200 root posts all on the Steemit front end since the day my account was created, despite it never being a pleasant user interface, I just got used to it and never left it...before Hive.
Don't get me wrong, I still love STEEM and still hold on to my stake there supporting other communities and projects with my delegations, but I won't commit on building it anymore besides the dApps I still think will have a huge impact going forward into mainstream, like Appics (I still don't know what they're going to do with Hive yet).
So, in conclusion, what does HIVE mean to me?
The rebirth of the original vision of Steem, a decentralized social media platform built by voluntarists, visionaries, freedom lovers, entrepreneurs, cryptocurrency enthusiasts and amazing content creators without the need of a central authority taking care of its development and promotion.
I have seen more energy released here in 1 week than what I have seen on Steem for the last 4 years.
Hive is for information, what Bitcoin is for money.
Where do we go from here?
It is up to us, the decentralized Hive community, there will certainly be a lot of challenges along the way but there's already a lot of stuff going on in the background I can't even keep up with everything and believe me when I say, I'm literally here every single day.
I believe a lot of people are now watching the development of Hive and we already proved the crypto industry that a community of REAL people, is not up for sale.
Being able to use the DAO as a funding mechanism for development without having to ask permission to a single entity is what really makes me excited about this blockchain.
Permission-less, isn't this what blockchain is all about anyway?
Unfortunately, I can't 'hard fork' my wardrobe as well, but I'm glad @jaynie already has a solution to that! 😀
Note: 10% of the rewards are donated to @steem.dao.