Now, before any of you go full on toxic, please bear in mind that I have decided to do content & related services 100% from now on, every waking business hours for the years to come :-)

As a long time photographer its hard for me to disregard platforms like Hive, simply since I have an archive of literally tens of thousands of images that can earn some there. Also I produce new content most weeks, its a deeply ingrained habit that also gives me energy.

I do agree that Bitcoin, Lightning and Nostr will eventually demolish platforms like these, but for practical purposes I need to know how and preferably when.

So this tiny economy exists on Hive now, whether you like it or not. Where the funding comes from is not clear, and some whales do manipulate the game. The tech itself is really great, imagine Lightning built out with lots of functions that just work, and with no fees!

Will this "first mover" advantage be enough for Hive to stay in the game? At the moment I think not. If/when we get into the next leg of the bull market I'll re-assess that, and also decide how much time I dedicate to building my presence there.

What I need to see as a creator is that a more unified, user friendly experience emerges around Bitcoin, Lightning and Nostr, which then triggers an influx of ordinary users that can install an app and maybe store a key securely, but that's it.

Also I need to see projects taking on the big bad platforms like Amazon. Of course a lot of projects are launched, but the problem is that first scaling problem: how do you get to at least a few thousands of users and a few hundred creators that makes user retention possible.

Now, SN is of course already there, and I'm super happy about having an intelligent audience where I need to pull no punches, but in order to make it to the next, super critical phase we need to see these things happen.

Although I did my first programming ~4 decades ago in BASIC and also got onto Linux in 98 I'm not the archetypical coder. I do understand the tech, can install and tweak most things, and also hope to get back into a part time dev role within the ecosystem.

My thing has always been early adoption, for those decades, and now I'm going full in on this, which means I'll try to do what I can from this perspective. :-)

I do hope to keep this running as a brainstorming piece for myself and maybe others, and would love to be part of building a resilient, better platform than Hive!

The same goes for any other platform where micropayments is already a thing. I did use Minds quite a bit years ago as an example, but unfortunately that is a goner. Unless they get funding in the next leg up of course, which might make things interesting!

Odysee/LBRY is another platform to mention, it was very promising, but got whacked by the SEC. Which makes it an interesting case to take on; anyone who gets a similar, completely uncensorable platform going doing the same thing should get an influx of the freedom creators that use(d) that :-)