When the beta test of the communities went live, I quickly created a sports betting community. The price to create such a community were peanuts and still are. Only 3 steem were needed to create a community. Quickly after the creation, the beta.steemit.com site had some issues. Because of this no regular user could log in anymore. These issues seems to be solved and the communities are increasing day by day! So I did lost sight of it!

Since this week I am trying to use the communities more actively and it quickly became clear that there are great things and things which could be improved. But because this is only a beta versions this is normal.

Since the beta test did open! 100 communities are already created. Some more active than others! Still do wonder how good the metrics are which are shown in the explore community page. Take for instance the sport betting community, where there are 7 subscribers which is accurate. But is also show 7 posters and 13 posts but when only post has been written in this community. So maybe the tag is used more often but isn’t used as first tag!

It has potential!

After using it only a few days I already do see the added value of the communities!

When logging into to the beta steemit site, it gives me automatically an overview of all (trending) posts written in the communities to which I did subcribe. I rather preferred that they would have set the new page as default but it is what it is. This overview does give the opportunity to discover posts which I should like because I am a member of the community, so I should have a shared interest in the post! Okay when also subscribed to the #ocd community one still gets a broad spectrum of posts.

Not only gives me this an easier opportunity to discover posts to my liking but also it is a great opportunity to discover new steem authors which were unknown to me!

If I only want to see the post of a specific community, I just have to click on the community of my desire. To bad again the site does show me the trending page of the community and not the desired newly created posts!

But one can also easily view their regular feed as we did know it without the community feature. To find this you just have to click on the my friends button on the left side of the screen.

So for me this is a blessing at the moment. My feed is drying up by the week and it is hard to discover new authors with a shared interest. So with the community feature I can start filling up my feed again!
Another plus is that one can follow the community without having to add all users as friends!

Posting in a community

Well this was a little bit hard for me at the beginning.
There are 2 ways to post in a community. The most easy one is to go to the community site and click the “New Post” button.
This should automatically add the community tag! I am testing this out with this post. So if it doesn't show up in the PHC community feed, I know that next time I will have to add the tag anyhow! I suppose that it will work because 8 tags are allowed.

But because we are still all human it is sometimes hard to leave your known and beloved steem condenser. If you add write a post in for instance busy or steempeak, one also can post in a community as long as the community tag is the first tag used.
This is for the moment still cumbersome because one cannot use a regular tag, but you do have to use the hive-xxxx tag.

The mistake I did make in the beginning was to created the post like I was used in steemit. By using the write new post button at the top of the page! No problem if you do use the community tag as first tag, but if you don’t it is impossible to get it into the feed of the community anymore.

So if your feed is drying up and you do want to discover new posts which could interest you or just want new friends, try out the beta community site!

So have you tried out the community site yet?
Do you also see the potential?
Would be glad to hear!

Cheers,
Peter