The Forking Of Steem: More Decentralized Social Media Opportunities

Make no mistake about it. When it comes to the social media world and the help in enslaving humanity, the centralized social media platforms are accomplices. Their goal is to promote a narrative that is going to lead to the death of millions of people. We saw this throughout history.

For those of us involved in cryptocurrency, we can see power structure means a great deal. The entire situation with Steem was an individual coming in to try and take over. We witness this on a regular basis in the business world. As for social media, there are a handful of people who control those platforms.


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We know that Hive was a result of this conflict. One of the benefits of open source software is that anyone can use it. This means that starting a new chain simply requires the technical know-how along with a desire to have something different.

Many did not like what was taking place on Steem. What ensued was that 100 or so people got together and created what they saw as a better system.

Of course, not all agreed with this decision. In fact, there was a group that was upset by the actions on Steem as well as those taken by those who formed Hive. For this reason, those individuals got together and decided to start their own fork.

Hence, Blurt was brought to life.

From what I understand, this was a blockchain that was going to recreate what Steem was like before all the hard forks taking tokens away from accounts. The people behind this initiative found the idea of freezing anyone's stake to be completely distasteful. Thus, they embarked upon a new chain.

They also felt that downvotes and the debt based currency was not beneficial to the platform. When this platform goes live, that part of the code was removed.

What is interesting is that, evidently, conflict arose among that group. I can only surmise but I guess the actions of Sun in eliminating account balances got the attention of some who were behind Blurt. A division occurred as to whether to keep Sun's stake in place. After all, if he did it on Steem, he could do it on Blurt.

This led to the decision to exclude Steemit Inc from the airdrop, a decision that did not sit well with all.

Enter Zapata.

This is another chain that is going live that keeps the Steemit Inc stake in tact. It claims to hold the original intent of Blurt before the community decided to change their views on the stake.


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What does all this mean?

To start, snapshots were taken of Steem accounts before Hard Fork 23 and that will be the token distribution for both chains. The only difference between the two is that one will have the Steemit Inc stake, the other will not.

Secondly, depending upon the applications that are on there, I would imagine that content creators will have a few different options as to where their content can be posted. Just like videos can go on both YouTube and Facebook, people will be able to post on Hive, Zapata, and/or Blurt.

The tendency here will be for people to look at these new chains as competition. That is the wrong mindset. Certainly, we have no idea if these will attain any degree of success or not. Perhaps, one of them can become a raging hit. Only time will tell how all of this pans out.

What we do know is that there will be other options. Each chain will have people promoting it, potentially increasing the reach. The efforts of attracting people away from the centralized systems is benefited by more offerings.

This is the power of open source software. Anyone can experiment, create, and innovate as he or she sees fit. People are not going to agree and are free to set things up as they see fit. In this situation, there was a group of people who did not agree with the Hive move who forged their own path only to find they had disagreement, leading to a further split.

The success of these projects will depend upon the communities that are forming and the ability to attract newer participants. One of the success of Hive is the fact that a strong community was in place the second it went live. While not the biggest on the Internet, we can see the dedication exists with both users and developers.

Will this be the case with Blurt and Zapata? That is a question that cannot be answered. However, if there are people willing to put in the time and effort, those chains could create some applications that people will use. Of course, we saw many forks of the Steem software languish so there is no guarantee.

No matter what the results, it is great to see different groups getting together and expressing their freedom to establish systems how they see fit. None of us have to agree with them nor do we have to utilize what is being offered. Many will simply accept the tokens and either sell them or hold onto them like lottery tickets. Nevertheless, more options are going to be presented.

We are in the "attention economy". It is all about where people are focusing their eyeballs. Right now, the centralized social media dominates in this area. Future success of all decentralized projects is going to depend upon the ability to lure those eyeballs over to their platforms.

In the next couple weeks, there will be a couple more chains that go live which are going to have to get busy trying to attract attention. The Internet has billions of users. It is just a matter of drawing a portion of them to individual projects.


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61 comments
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I am interested where the name Zapata came from.

"It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees" is what I think of every time I have heard the name.

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It just hit me. I was trying to think of something snappy that would play well in Nigeria as that's our initial focus.

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Why Nigeria?

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It's a high impact market with a large youth population.

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What exactly will you do in Nigeria? or what will happen? @birdinc

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Our mission is to build a social blockchain app that takes Instagram in one specific market.

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I think Turkey 's should consider. Because Turkey's young population and generally much closer to Europe.

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Do Blurt and Zapata have URL’s yet?

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watch blurt.blog (currently points to Hive) and test.blurt.world points to Blurt testnet.

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where can I see more about Zapata / Blurt ?

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They both have discord groups.

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Will you inform us about them in your future posts?

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I am annoyed that I was powered up at that time... will have to powerdown again.

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They couldn’t think of a better name than Blurt?

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wonder if they focus on blogging or short content from like twitter and the likes.

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They removed the downvote so it could be that they are focusing upon all content but I cant say for sure.

I guess it will be up to the users to decide what gets put up.

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It'll be interesting to see what people will do with their tokens, my gut reaction is that they'll me a massive hard sell-off!

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It'll be interesting to see where they are going to be listed.

I have yet to hear of any place where they can be traded.

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(Edited)

Are the sites even live yet, I did a trawl on Twitter and everything seems to have gone a bit dead.

I'm sure you'll be able to get the coins out via Hive-engine - who knows, 10 000 Blurt may get you a couple of LEO, if you sell quickly enough!

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We are working on the sites, blurt.blog currently points to Hive.

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It's interesting to see how Steem forks are poping just the same way Bitcoin forks did two years ago with Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and many others. The huge difference is that the first Bitcoin blockchain remains the leader while the first Steem blockchain seems to be losing users and value as days go by.

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Yes, it was exactly that. What will happen to USDT and USDC?

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It sounds like both will be listed on Probit, which is nice. Would be great if Bittrex would list one or both as well.

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I hadnt heard that. Thanks for that info @jrcornel.

At least they will be listed somewhere.

We will see how the projects unfold.

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@jrcornel @taskmaster4450 yes very likely both will get Probit from the start, also Blurt will have a Uniswap gateway that will be maintained by the Blurt Foundation, we will hit exchanges one by one. Bittrex is on the list, they will have been airdropped balances so it is a good reason for them to support Blurt and Zapata.

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A very nice explanation post. Thanks...

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Both are interesting projects, but someone needs to address the witness voting issue for long term security. Stakeholders should be able to vote for about 5 witnesses tops.

Currently both successful deployments have huge issues with centralization

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We are thinking more of features such as 1 Staked Token 1 Vote, uncapped votes for validators ie can vote more than 30 for better distribution and even encouraging vote participation by requiring stakeholders to vote at least X number of validators in order to receive the ~2.5% pa staking rewards.

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Many opportunities, indeed... but I am also skeptical. Inevitably, we face the problem of "dilution."

Let's not forget that there was WEKU long before the current situation, a Steem copy in response to a previous hardfork/policy change. And then there was BearShares, which was a split from WEKU because someone disagreed with the handling of affiliate bonuses. And then of course there's WhaleShares which is yet another alternative "we can do better" thing.

I'm still seeing the fact that Hive has succeeded as well as it has as a small miracle! Normally, the "first mover advantage" is all but impossible to overcome because most people are too apathetic to respond to new alternatives with more enthusiasm than a cautious "I'm gonna wait and see." Hive DID have the benefit of such a large proportion of the primary content creators and influencers were onboard from the start.

I have a feeling both Blurt and Zapata will find it extremely difficult to overcome the vast majority's desire to just power down and cash out. I think people will either LEAVE completely, or they will merely COPY their Hive posts... and where's the Business Reason to just operate a copy of something else, with little original differentiation to attract interest.

My mildly educated guess would be that after a few months — IF the tokens can be traded anywhere — both of these sites will have little ORIGINAL activity, and their respective tokens will decline in value to some fractions of a cent.

I hope they both prove me wrong! Sincerely, I do....

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At the end of the day the whole of crypto and bitcoin is one great experiment, if we don't try we don't know. It is clear Hive had the prefect media storm behind their success, that was quite a cinderella story. Blurt intends to build a solid foundation and community and prefers to grow at a stable and sustainable pace rather than be like "Z-crash" which mooned rapidly and fell back down in a short period of time.

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I recently went into the Blurt Discord and told them they should nullify the stake of both sides. If you want to create a new community, you need a new distribution. Any Graphene (DPOS) fork that uses the same distribution is doomed to fail. No big players on either side of the voting war asked for these forks to happen. They already have their chain secured. Airdropping people huge sums when you know they don't want to be a part of the community is a foolish idea. These forks scream Ethereum Classic "code is law" all over them.

Something that you haven't mentioned in the original post: these forks hinge on a centralized account that controls every witness. Theoretically that account has diminishing returns over time. It's like a ticking clock for failure. If the big accounts that were airdropped coins dump, everyone loses; if they hold, everyone loses. If the centralized agent decides to increase their own power, everyone loses.

In my opinion the people in charge of the new distribution have no idea what they are doing. I guess they'll either prove me wrong or learn the hard way. Should be interesting either way.

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Its a cash grab. If they make some money off the launch and it fails....well, as long as they get paid who cares?

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On Blurt we are going to be researching improved consensus models for the next HF later in the year, features such as 1 Staked Token 1 Vote, uncapped votes for validators ie can vote more than 30 for better distribution and even encouraging vote participation by requiring stakeholders to vote at least X number of validators in order to receive the ~2.5% pa staking rewards.

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nice. 1 to 1 voting is pretty important

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This is hilarious. Blurt and Zapata remind be of the Bitcoin Gold fork. Rank opportunism after seeing the success of the previous fork for HIVE.

The fact they are only just now realising (or are still in denial) about the likelihood of Steemit centralising the stake if given the opportunity is pure clown car madness.

Remember when there was Whaleshares...and those other 2 STEEM clones (that I now forget the name of) ? Yeh, that wasn't so long ago. Where is the point of difference for these 2 chains? Other than token distribution? Pfft.

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There are quite alot of differences, no downvotes which means people can have freedom of voice without being afraid of flag wars and being bullied, no stable coin like HBD/SBD for a simpler economy. Blurt will focus on a mobile app and advanced governance features to prevent large stake from controlling consensus, Zapata will focus on dominating third world countries like Nigeria with a single country focus at a time.

Both have teams of enthusiasts who are doing it for enjoyment as well as profit, where there is passion, success will follow.

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Will Blurt be completely mobile, or will there be a desktop version available also?

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Will be here looking at how things goes.

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I think the future of cryptocurrencies depends on decentralized social media platforms. Its value will increase as we use it.

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(Edited)

I guess another one steem/hive fork from nigerians... interesting.

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