After such an uncertain month with regards the future of Steem, it looks like decisions have now been made and there will be a fork in the path. Our first piece of community news should fill you all in there. I'd be interested to hear what people have to say on it and where they think they will keep their homes; on Steem, Hive or both.

Apologies for missing last week's newsletter, assuming it was noticed amongst all the kerfuffle going on. Everything seemed so uncertain, that I thought it best to just take a step back. Things seem to have come to something of a stalemate for the moment and people are trying to get back to their usual activity if they haven't already thrown in the towel.

With the new communties feature, Steem has been a hive of activity, but with an undertone of wondering what will be happening moving forward with the Steemit buyout by Tron owner Justin Sun. I think most have taken the approach of business as usual, but it has impacted some projects that were doing some good things and left them at a standstill until we know where things stand.

With the sale of Steemit to TRON's @JustinSunSteemit, there's lots of chatter happening. I'm glad to see it's not put people off posting as usual, though, and we have lots of great content as for you again this week.There is nearly a week to go if you still want to get entries in for the current @naturalmedicine challenge. Choose any natural medicine/healing topic you want and the aim is to encourage you to make it stand out, because they want to showcase it to the community and beyond!

It probably takes me longer that it should, each time I sit down to write this newsletter. There is always so much to read and I get distracted and start chatting to the creators on my personal account and excitedly sending links to curators! So as always, I think there's lots to love in this week's newsletter.

Over at the @ecotrain community, @eco-alex has the third non-violent communication workshop up.The @naturalmedicine community has plenty going on as always. The "Art is Healing" challenge is open until 8th February. They are challenging you to write a research article worthy of trending and if you have medicinal knowledge on cannabis they are eager to hear about it and ready to support any content you might produce.