Hive growth
As Hive community, we often talk about growth. It's a topic that is discussed often on Hive, in the Discord channels and in Hive podcasts.
Discussions about how we need more active users, more interesting content, more interaction. There are a lot of initiatives of sharing Hive content on Web2 platforms, which is a powerful way to reach new audiences. The Posh initiative for instance generates a lot of views from platforms like Reddit. I've a couple of my photos and blogs being shared on Reddit that generated quite some traffic to Hive.
Account creation
This stream of new people checking out Hive is great, but when they are interested in joining comes the crucial moment: creating an account. And that’s where things go wrong.
What a new user experiences at that point is simply too cumbersome. The process is complicated, not intuitive, and often unclear.
The amount of options that are presented and the many steps a person has to take before he or she can start using are reasons for the average internet user to give up quickly. Especially when they are not interested in tech or crypto.
And even when they manage to create an account, the inability to interact because of a lack of resource credits is highly discouraging.
And that is really a missed opportunity.
Potential
I think there is a lot of potential in Hive. Even though I often hear that blogging is dead, I still think that the community aspects of Hive are still very attractive for people. You can create your niche community and share whatever you want.
I think there are a lot of communities that could become very active when they could onboard large groups of new users.
Initiatives
I’ve been asking around on Discord lately, and it’s clear this issue is known. I've also discovered that there are several initiatives to improve the onboarding process. I already knew about the Inleo 'easy onboarding' methods. The opinions on that are divided. From the botnets it resulted in to the fact that new users wouldn't have the access to their own keys this way.
Yesterday I had a chat with 
@thebeedevs/google-login-arrives-on-denser
@thebeedevs/decentralized-google-login
And he also mentioned the Hiveinvite tool that is made by
This tool removes some of the hurdles by giving Hive users the option to generate account creation links from the free account tokens they have. It even has the option to delegate some HP to for the new accounts, which is great.
The hurdle that is left is that the Hiver that has generated the link does need to creates it the account, so there still is some friction.
Apart from that the users are redirected to the default hive.blog/faq page. Ideally I would like to redirect newly recruited accounts directly to the community I've invited them to.
Coordinated collaboration?
As you see, there are some initiatives to improve onboarding of new users. It is quite telling that I didn't know about most of them, although I'm quite active myself on Hive. I think there is a lack of coordinated collaboration on this subject. There are some good initiatives, but none of them seem to be really removing the onboarding friction we're dealing with without opening the door to more spammers and scammers.
I think we need to find a solution that allows users to quickly and safely create and use an account that can be implemented into all the front ends like Hive.blog, 
I don't have the solution and I don't have enough knowledge to contribute to this on a technical level. I know there couple of Hivers that do have these skills. The developed tools have shown that.
But what I can do, and what I'm trying to do with this blog is addressing this subject and try make devs combine their knowledge to come up with a solution that might solve this issue.
I hope this blog will open a discussion about this important subject.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post. Feel free to share your perspective in the comments.
Friendlymoose
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