Steem: a hard fork to expel Justin Sun

After the purchase of Steemit by TRON and therefore Justin Sun, the Steem community is considering countermeasures to get rid of the powerful new owner of the main interface. 

Steem is a decentralized network, based on a decentralized blockchain, but its main interface, Steemit, is now controlled by Justin Sun and the TRON Foundation. 

This doesn’t go down well with many members of the Steem community, to the point where a hard fork has been proposed to expel Sun. 

Yesterday, in fact, a new blockchain was announced, called Hive, which will be launched on March 20th as a Steem hard fork. 

As a result, the Steem blockchain will continue to work as it does now, including the Steemit interface, while the new blockchain is being announced as a more decentralized project, based on DPoS and no longer on the staking implemented by Steemit Inc., now owned by TRON. 

The promoters of this fork claim to have a large group of Steem community members on their side who are more oriented towards decentralization and want to return to the strong original values of the Steem community. 

Once forked, Hive will work completely independently of Steem, and all valid accounts on the Steem blockchain will receive an airdrop on Hive. In fact, the initial launch of Hive will be an exact copy of Steem’s blockchain, with a few minor updates, to then return to community discussions on future developments.

In other words, for now, Hive will be nothing more than a spin-off of Steem without the dominant power of Steemit, and which will evolve along its own path in the future.

It remains to be seen how many users will join the new project, and whether it will be able to establish itself over time, or whether it will be outclassed by the Steem/TRON pair. 

The fact is that decentralized social networks arise precisely as an alternative to centralized social networks, against which it would be very difficult to compete if they were not able to offer something that the latter offer – decentralization. 

Therefore, the more this social network centralizes, the more it loses its main competitive advantage over the large and powerful centralized social networks. 

Other decentralized social networks

An attempt in some ways similar is the Italian social network Cam.tv, which uses the LKSCOIN blockchain to enhance the protection of content produced by users as well as their remuneration. 

It is possible to think of harnessing the new crypto technologies to create innovative and different social networks compared to traditional ones, but they must have very different characteristics from those of the more popular competitors. 

In this perspective, the more Steem is centralized, the more it could lose appeal and at this point projects like Hive could have the potential to succeed.