Greetings good people (and cats!) of Hivelandia!

It's a cold, gray and windy Sunday here in the Pacific Northwest, so we're all nestling in for the day. Glad I live in a nice warm house!

I'm sure glad I live indoors!

As I was thinking about how many of us try to do our respective parts towards growing the overall Hive community and ecosystem, one of the things that personally makes me happy is the relatively new Hive Pets Community.

Aside from it being highly relevant to this blog, the reason this community matters is because "Pets" is a very global and mainstream topic. According to some estimates, more than one half of the world's households have at least one pet of some kind: Cat, dog, bird, fish, reptile, etc. and yet it's a very clearly defined niche.

By extension, it's the type of content a broad spectrum of general users can relate to... which is an important thing to have, in the marketing of an emerging community. Still less than a year old, Hive is definitely still emerging.

Let's face it, much as we'd all like to think that blockchain, crypto, dApps and decentralization are the bees knees it still remains a very tiny niche... and if you're "out there" trying to persuade people to become community members, 98% of them are just going to have their eyes glaze over if that's what you focus on. Sure, they may have "heard of Bitcoin" but that's not necessarily a huge point of attraction... and it's a long way from "heard of Bitcoin" to actually understanding and using cryptocurrencies.

"You can blog about your cats, dogs and other pets!" is a far more user friendly sales pitch.

What's my point here?

My point is that if we sincerely want this community to grow, we need to also highlight what I think of as "ordinary content" as part of the effort to draw people to one of Hive's front ends.

Once people are tuned into pets, gardening, hobbies, crafts, cooking, comic book collecting or whatever... we can always "reverse engineer" the importance of blockchains, censorship resistance, decentralization, cryptocurrencies and whatever else into their awareness.

I just think too much focus on the technical end of things scares a lot of potential users off.

PLUS, pitching Hive's many aspects and communities to people who are already crypto/blockchain aware doesn't exactly spread more awareness of what we're trying to do here. Seems to me we also need to bring in completely new users, much the way @leofinance is trying to do with people interested in investing, as that market exists separately from blockchain.

Being somewhat "low tech" but still an active community member here, my own favorite communities here include Hive Pets, Natural Medicine, Creative Coin and Caturday, none of which are even remotely technical in nature. And that set of preferences is probably more representative of the broader world... and yet I still really enjoy being part of this "crypto-social" experience and learning what it has to offer, without having to step outside my typical areas of interest.

Well, that's about it for Sunday thoughts from the cat bed. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my napping!

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

=^..^=

Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communties!

If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?

These are some of the more active Cat Communities — why not join them ALL? Remember, you can also "cross-post" your cat posts to them!

HiveCats by @curatorcat is a central "gathering place" for cat content on Hive; promoting the use of the #hivecats tag for feline content!

Cat Snaps by @manorvillemike is a place to post pictures of your cats when you don't have a whole lot to say beyond just sharing your cute photos!

Caturday Community by @saboin is a community where we get to celebrate posts relating to Saturday — aka "Caturday" — our own special day!

Cat Photos by @andrarchy is a "mixed use" cat content community; posts can be just photos or longer, as long as the subject is CATS! It has a lot of subscribers but is not very active.

Cats by @captainklaus (and Sissi!) is another "general" cat content community; it's there, but not very active.

Last, but certainly not least, a special shoutout to the recently formed Hive Pets Community which has become quite active and has quite a bit of cat content!

There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!

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