I was scrolling through my posts from the last couple of years when I saw an interesting one from 2018 (by the way, we really need a better way of looking at previous posts).
Based on that post I almost cheekily called this post an "IToldYaSo" post instead of a "Retroblog" (went with the latter because it sounds better and will be more reusable).
The name of that post was: EOS and STEEM May Not Be in Competition, but Steem Dapps and EOS Dapps Will Be. It was written in a time way before Hive, when it seemed that the values of Steemit Inc. and the values of the Steem community were not mutually exclusive.
This time in 2018 was just after Dan Larimer had left the platform to start another crypto project EOS, which he thought would solve the problems Steem had (spoiler alert: it didn't and he's already moved on to another project).
But the article wasn't about Dan, or even about EOS and Steem (now Hive). It was about how the apps on both chains would likely end up in competition. Here we are in 2021, Peakd vs Voice. Something else, no?
Only it isn't quite what it seems. It might be argued that Peakd and Voice are more in competition with Big Tech than they are with each other. Of course, that very competition may be what's making it so that there's only currently space for one. But when you think about it, they both do meaningfully different things in the same way as, say, Facebook and Twitter. Then again, maybe not different enough...
What I'm trying to say is, we probably won't know outside of hindsight some years from now.
What I realize from where we are now looking back is this: things have gone fairly differently than most of us were thinking they would back in 2018 (let alone 2016!).
But just about all of the unexpected changes are good ones.
Back in those days it felt like a ton of intense drama happening inside a very long boxing match.
Dan, Ned, and Steemit Inc. being gone, while at the time seeming to signal the end of Steem, was really the beginning of Hive. And Hive, a much more decentralized community than Steem ever had (because all of the power is now on-chain vs having to wrestle with Steemit Inc and Ned), is so much better than almost anything we could imagine happening with Steem.
True, we lost out on SMTs (the code is apparently there and they're considering how best to implement it if at all, but I'm not holding my breath and neither should you). But it looks as though the infrastructure changes that are happening at an ever more rapid pace are enabling a resurgence of Hive dapps, possibly even eventually allowing for a very SMT-like option.
I, for one, am excited to see what @blocktrades, the Hive witness, and the community come up with. Look forward to doing a Retroblog on this post to see if I was right in 2024. See you there.