The News

The world is being rocked by more conflict. You would think that adults could discuss their issues instead of sending their young people to die and bring chaos to many more in the countries affected. I care more about the people than the markets, but no doubt this will affect where investors put their money. I have no idea if crypto is considered a good place for it. At least $HIVE is back ahead of the blue coin, but the gap is smaller than previously. The massive volume over there did not make a huge difference.

We know where the real community and development are. Last week someone mentioned on Snaps that it would be nice to have a Wordle game on Hive. This is a daily word puzzle that is really popular and some of us have been posting our daily results. Within hours of the request we had HiveWord from @beggars and Hive Word from @coldbeetrootsoup. Yes, the names are very similar. We are seeing a lot of new games and apps as people exploit 'AI' tools to achieve rapid development. @beggars has been particularly productive and wrote about how you do not need a lot of funding to produce something. Of course some projects are much bigger and need humans to design and test them, but it seems that these new tools can make people more productive. I have been a developer in other fields for many years and have yet to get into this.

Other important developments in the Hive world were improvements to chat from @peakd.open, upgrades to @threespeak and also to @ecency.app

I had noticed that the 3speak experience was much improved when I last uploaded a video. It is more like you get from the big platforms and the encoding process is more efficient thanks to people contributing their processing power.

Peakd and Ecency have both had chat for a while. They do similar things, but are separate. They each allow you to talk to individuals or within a community in a similar way to Discord. Discord offers more features, but some are concerned about the fraud you see there (as below) and that they are asking for proof of age on some channels. Many of us will not want to submit our official documents to such platforms. We should make more use of these chat options as we can be more sure of who we are talking to since it links in with Hive accounts that are very hard to fake.

I have not looked into what is new with Ecency, but I use the mobile app all the time. They have a very active community, but I have a personal preference for Snaps over Waves and @snapie gives me a mobile option.

Friday Follows

• I have mentioned them before, but I really enjoy the comics from @sidekickmatt and @northwestnomad. Matt is very prolific with several series being posted on Hive. Those from @northwestnomad are less frequent, but will be fun if you are into Dungeons and Dragons. We have had other comic artists here who have not been active lately, but I hope some will come back. As in other fields it can produce extra income in a competitive on-line world and people will notice if others are earning.
• @louis88 is a fellow solar energy fan with a small balcony system that is working well for him.
• I have met up with @revisesociology at various Hive events. As a sociologist he has interesting things to say about the world we live in.
• I have followed @normie.fitness for years as he went from mostly gym workouts to more cycling and running. We will each have our own goals, but staying healthy is a priority. He has some good tips.

As usual rewards of this post will be shared via @commentrewarder. Previously I would just add people I mentioned as beneficiaries, but this lets me reward any commenter as long as they have something of value to say.

The Dog House

I mentioned above the risks on Discord. I have encountered a fake support scam myself. What tends to happen is that you ask a support question in the appropriate channel and someone will pop up directing you to a different channel. That should be an immediate red flag. They may then try to get you to hand over your keys or give away other personal data. They will quickly delete their messages from the original channel. It is hard for the moderators to catch this as anyone can generate new accounts.

There was a different case recently where someone was being impersonated on Hive with a very similar account name. The give-away there would be their low reputation score. It is hard to get a high score and very easy to lose it if people see you acting maliciously. Always do a few checks before trusting someone.

You should not be entering your keys into web sites and especially not ones without an established reputation on Hive. Everything ought to be using Keychain these days. The look of a site can easily be faked so check where you are landing.

Fraud is rampant on the internet in general. Many people will not understand the risks. Usually with banking you can have some way to recover funds, but with crypto your security is totally in your hands and anything you lose is likely to be gone forever. We need to alert people of known scams and educate them on how to stay safe. Hive is the wild west, but we can look out for each other.

The End

I have seen a couple of people say they are stepping away from Hive for their own reasons. Being online can be stressful and is not for everyone. It may be that the community they seek is elsewhere. Hive is still quite small and we need to reach the critical mass where there is something for everyone.

I have found the Hive community to be overwhelmingly friendly and positive, but there will be some outliers who try to spoil it. I try to avoid those. The system manages to hide their activity from me and my notifications are not overloaded.

Stay healthy, stay safe and Hive five!

The man behind:

@tenkminnows: Helping good Hivers level up @proofofbrian: A bot that checks for tag typos #BritList: A monthly list of Hivers in the UK