Why Communities Are Such A Game Changer

As you've maybe or maybe not seen the Steemit beta site is back open where you can get a sneak peak of the future of Steemit.com. If you haven't seen it yet you can check it out here

https://beta.steemit.com/

The big new feature is something we've literally been waiting on for years and when @roadscape presented this at Steem Fest he said it was deceptively simple, but extremely powerful. As I've been playing around and thinking more about them I think I'm seeing what he meant.

This is an incredibly powerful feature. On the surface, you might look at this, think it's nice that it's grouping relevant content into one place and think that's it. It's only the beginning.

The different communities are distinguished from one another with a tag "hive-xxxxxx". As we've seen with tribes, you can do some interesting things with a tag. You can run your own Condenser fork and only show the content with that tag. You can create your own totally unique website and only show content with that tag. Who's to say you couldn't take 5 tags and only show those. This means any community can be born on Steemit.com, but could then expand to their own frontend. Depending on the type of content, these frontends could look vastly different.

There could be one laid out like Twitter, one like Facebook, one like Youtube. Steem can become the social platform of many faces. No longer do we have to bicker about what Steem is, because finally it can be all the things we want it to be. It can be blogging, social networking, picture sharing, video sharing, streaming, whatever, and each of these communities can do their own thing without infringing on the user experience of other communities.

Oh, and what else did we learn from tribes that we can do with a tag? We can also distribute a token based on that tag. So whether you want to create a Steem Engine token or wait for an SMT, you can also associate a token with your community and distribute that to the people who post there. This again further empowers these Communities to not only have the choice of full independence from Steemit.com, but to also have their own tokens and economies. Combine that with their own frontends, their own revenue generation, we're looking at endless possibilities.

It doesn't stop there. We now rope in all the other benefits of blockchain and apply those at the community level. Your community is YOURS, no one can take it away from you. You can casually house it on Steemit.com or you could have you own site, app, token, economy, etc. It can stay small, or grow exponentially. There's nothing stopping anyone from growing a community of thousands of people and leveraging it for whatever that community wants.

This is a little scatterbrained because my head is spinning with all the possibilities but here are a few things I could see happening.

• Template condenser forks or just totally custom sites for different layouts for sale like Wordpress templates.
• Mobile apps built around communities. (A twitter clone would be amazing)
• New innovative revenue sharing models within communities
• We could successfully do children's content. Might need a few features, like a everyone is muted by default option for a community. So it would effectively be invite only.
• People that are not a part of a community competing to build better frontends to get people to consume content on their site.

There's a lot that can be done, so start thinking big about the future. It's coming.

P.S.

Christmas came a little early this year and on the new Steemit beta site you can see we'll FINALLY have notifications! It's happening. We're growing up!

P.S.S.
Follow my community Steem Artstation for cool art stuff. Still trying to get the word out that it exists and getting people to post in there, but it'll be poppin soon enough, so don't wait, just jump in! :) I'll see you all there.