Steemit is taking its first ever public event to the platform’s European enthusiasts as a three-day conference slated to be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands November 11 - 13.
Though supported by the popular social media platform where users get rewarded to post and vote online, SteemFest is organized by a Steem developer and entrepreneur who built the apps SteemyOrNot and RadioSteem.
Roeland Landegent said the event’s idea came to be after he shared it with and was accepted by CEO Ned Scott. He later reached out to an initial group of early Steem users and 'Steemcelebs' and other Steemians whom he got to know in the past few months to gather their interest.
Landegent told CoinTelegrapgh:
“Since I registered on 7 July on Steemit (3 days after the payouts started), I immediately became a huge fan after discovering it. I must admit at first I was a bit wary but soon I was hooked. About 6 weeks ago when I was doing the dishes and thinking about Steemit, it popped up to me for the first time: 'How cool would it be to have a global get together where Steemians from all over the world can meet each other'.”
Competition as engine for the social media
Steemit, as well as other platforms such as diaspora*, AKASHA, and Synereo, represent a few new decentralised social media initiatives that are introducing true competition as an engine for improvement in the social media market. They focus on the freedom of speech, elimination of advertising from social media and rewarding of users who create high-quality content, or act as curators. These are some of the issues that are being raised against the top centralized social media platform, Facebook, especially across Europe.
Landegent added:
“I remembered the early days when Twitter was gaining a bit of traction amongst early adopters in the Netherlands and I started 'following' a group of Dutch twitter users. It was only after 3-4 months the group got together in real life and that first meetup was so weird and so much fun at the same time. You talked to people for the first time whom you had learned to know already through their tweets for 3 months in a row. Many of those people I met 7 years ago I still reckon to be great friends & acquaintances and from that very meeting, much later on, even babies were born!”