Aloha Blurt - My First Post Here, There's A Lot To Talk About!

Greetings to everyone here on Blurt. I finally got around to posting here and checking out what's going on. If you don't know, I am an early adopter of Steem/Hive and have been a witness since 2016.

As some will know I have long been outspoken online and on Hive/Steem too, usually gaining support in the process but also gaining heavy censorship. My own social network that I built myself over 7 years was delisted by Google early on (I presume) because it contained a wealth of information about how to break free from the heartless control system that has been forced onto much of humanity. Part of that includes personal healing, balancing and evolution - plus also exposing the techniques and lies used to control us.

I built that site after seeing myself systematically censored on Youtube & Facebook. Even before all of this I was on Tribe.net, which for me was the original (free speech) social network and contained a huge number of open minded people teaching and sharing with each other. It was eventually bought out and shut down (through deliberately poor maintenance and failure to develop it) by Cisco Systems. Note: I have seen some people claiming that Tribe was a place for child abusers, but I never saw anything like that at all - it was originally the only real place for free thinkers to congregate in a social network online. Once Cisco got hold of it, I left - so it may be that after that they deliberately corrupted it in that way. I do think, though, that anyone speaking of Tribe as a place for child abusers has fallen prey to a deliberate (and seriously evil) takeover and misinformation strategy.

In any case, I came to Steem early on as it was inspiring to see decentralised and public systems being used to further social networking online. Once Hive was spawned due to Justin Sun's takeover of Steem, I figured that Hive would see a resurgence of support for free speech on Hive and a strong intention to escape the kind of behaviour that Justin Sun brought to Steem.

While it is clear that plenty of the key people on Hive do share this intent and are using Hive for support of free speech and personal expression, it is also clear that a small minority of large stakeholders intend the opposite - or at least intend to abuse the system as much as possible for their own ends while claiming to be doing the opposite and accusing their victims of doing what they are doing in the process. It is for this reason and because I have been so heavily downvoted since October 2021 (really by one person on Hive with large stake) that I spent 2 weeks developing the Untrending report that lists all of the downvotes on Hive and gives people an opportunity to countervote them.

I am saying all this to introduce myself and to let you know that I am really truly interested in spaces that enable frees speech, before I am interested in cash. In fact, I lived for about 6 years mostly without cash as an experiment and would very much like to build a world where we exchange based on emotional value rather than imaginary monetary value - I feel that will bring us closer to nature and to ourselves and each other.

All that being said, we currently experience a corrupt paradigm based on money and I have bills to pay like most people, so I do what I can to thrive without compromising strong ethics and values. To that end, I like to support projects/people who are working to heal, balance and evolve this world - and appreciate support in return. If you know of any particular people or groups on Blurt who share this goal then let me know and I'll definitely check out what they are doing.

I am not currently leaving Hive to come to Blurt, partially because I want to try to fix Hive and I feel I am one of the few people with the intent, experience and connections to do so. Many people have put so much time into Hive that it would be a major problem for DPOS as a whole if it were abandoned simply due to the actions of 1 or 2 people. Clearly, as with Steem, it IS possible for a big whale to come in and destroy a DPOS space - but since we don't have the same problem with Hive as we did with Steem (the ninja mined stake and Steemit Inc. controlling things) this is less likely. I personally see Layer 2 communities as a strong way to counter the 'Justin Sun' problem with DPOS, but we shall see.

As a software engineer I know that decentralisation and expansion requires multiple options and free choice. I don't have any problem with forks of Hive existing and I think that anyone on Hive who is against that is in denial of Hive's origins. Forks strengthen software and allow for better support for communities and greater experimentation.

So I'll definitely be posting to both Blurt and Hive for a while to see how things move on. I look forward to connecting with you all.

Questions about Blurt

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I have a few practical questions for the community here, can anyone answer them?

• I am not able to set an avatar or cover image in the blurt.blog UI - I have visited the Settings page and clicked around but there's no visible way to do it - is that a temporary bug or did I look in the wrong place?

• Is there a way to get Blurt notifications coming into Discord, as with Ginabot on Hive?

• Are there any plans for Layer 2 tokens on Blurt or are they not seen as useful here (yet)?

• Is there a directory of Blurt powered sites beyond blurt.blog? (If there are any such sites yet).

Wishing you well,

Ura-Soul