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.
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.
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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