My brain is spinning. It's like a post-apocalyptic world outside and a post-apocalyptic world on Steemit! I'm glad to have found some familiar faces over here 😁
I took time out from Steemit in early December, after my mum was rushed to hospital with a stroke. She sadly died on Christmas Eve. A massively busy time followed, as me and my sister informed all my mum's friends, arranged the funeral and contacted the family lawyer about her will and estate.
I had been living in Mum's flat, as her main carer. I needed to get my own flat on the market, then start clearing out Mum's flat, with a view to selling it and finding somewhere else to live.
It took me weeks to move everything from my flat into storage - everything except for the bulky furniture. There were just a few items to move, most needing to be dumped. But I could not get anyone to move them. The removal companies I contacted did not return my calls. The council told me there was a 6-8 week waiting list for picking up unwanted items.
Then the coronavirus crisis happened.
When I finally found a moment, I went onto Steemit. It looked pretty unrecognisable (although it usually looks unrecognisable when you've been away for a while!). I didn't have a Feed any more. I couldn't get it to work on my desktop computer.
I gave up, as I still had lots of other things to do.
A few days later I was on Twitter for the first time in ages, and I noticed that 
I went back to Steemit, and this time I managed to find a familiar account: 
After I'd read the first post, where 
The first thing that stood out for me was that he was extremely wealthy and suspiciously young! I have a theory (and a suspicious mind) that enormous wealth usually indicates either dodgy dealings or a well-connected leg-up (or both). Very few people acquire enormous wealth at a young age without being very well-connected - OR unless they are an actual genius, like Vitalik Buterin.
When I read more about Justin Sun, and learned that he'd been selected by Jack Ma to attend "Hupan University" at age 26, I had a very big "Ooft" moment. That would be Jack Ma of Alibaba fame, also connected with the development of creepy social credit systems.
I won't go into too much detail here, as I think all this will have been discussed on this platform Italicad nauseum.Italic But as I read further, it was a joy to learn how the Steemit blockchain and witnesses were able to resist the corporate takeover attempt. And discovering Hive is even more joyous.
Massive credit to the developers.
But I'm on a huge learning curve. I seem to be on a platform called Peakd, which looks great, but every now and then it disappears, and in order to get it back, I have to go via busy.org and then steemconnect.
I have so many questions. Is Hive an actual hardfork of Steemit, or is it totally new? Can I trade in my Steem and SBD for HIVE without having to use Bittrex?
Is the meaning of life still 42?
If anyone can point me to a post or a tweet or a Discord group that could answer these types of questions (especially the one about the meaning of life) I woukd be eternally grateful!
I'm very keen on decentralisation, and I was always a bit concerned that Steemit Inc could sell out to a big corporate player. But I thought it would be a Silicon Valley player!
From what I've seen of Hive, it looks like something really good and probably much improved is coming out of all this.
The future looks exciting!