The announcement of hive io has been widely and positively received. As of 20th March, 10 AM EST HIVE will be officially live and users will be airdropped their hive, hp and HBD with an exception to a few selected accounts. A few promises have been made about HIVE but mostly is oeft vague and "up to the community". It is supposedly the ultimate form of steem, powered by the community, guided in decentralisation.

As of now a huge part of the community has outspokenly shown support and interest in moving completely leaving behind what is believed to be a rotten corpse of what steem used to be.

Does this mark the end of it? I do not mean the blockchain or the currency, but the steem that meant so much to us.

Steem, technically, is just a blockchain technology and a cryptocurrency platform. But to me it was a lot more than that. It had become a special part of my life. So much of what it meant to me was either apparent in the posts I made about it like in the previous Dan contest, or the late night discord hangouts. It was appa when I went ranting about it to my friends or made a joke of myself on twitter. It was apparent when I discussed about it with my partner or spoke passionately of it. Steem is more than just code. It will hurt a lot to part ways.

Within my journey and the many hiatuses I have taken there always was an undivided attraction towards steem. The roots of it was always attached to what made steem special -THE COMMUNITIES

Throw aside all the drama, politics, circle jerking, hidden conspiracies or the camouflaged borderline centralised powerplays; tje community was the selling point. We argued over ways of advertising, approach to advertising, if whales mattered more than witnesses, if quality mattered over quantity, if content creators mattered over investment returns... We argued over a lot of things, but community is what we all had in common.

I believe what I'm trying to shoot at is that neither steem nor hive seem perfect. There is nothing as perfection. We only have attempts at perfection and hive is yet another strong attempt. There are still a lot of untied ends we are carrying over, or at least I see some. But, it doesn't matter as long as we have the community.

And that's where the stone splits.

I cannot just ignore the fact but the community seems rather split. For the first time I feel a very strong sense of splitting. No one likes centralisation and most agree we don't want to be part of the wrongdoers. But then again there might be some who don't want any of either side.

Where a lot of people have confirmed the move there sti are a lot who haven't confirmed staying or leaving or even hovering on both sides. Which is painful. We have fought a lot and hurted a lot. But the biggest pain is knowing that part of the community will be lost in between this tug-of-war and the steem community will not be what it once was, in hive or anywhere.

I'd hate to see a lot of community projects, dapps and groups fade away.
To better days ahead.
x.