A Free Lotus!

First of all, let's start with the AWESOME news. We've freed the LOTUS! This means that you can earn this alternative health token by using it on any alternative health content - from meditation to tai chi, yoga to plant based, herbalism to keto, if you have LOTUS staked and you vote on #lotus tagged content, you can earn this token.

And if you'd like to get in touch with some great ideas for use of this token, get in touch! The @holos-lotus, @theherbalhive, @abundancetribe and @plantpoweronhive all vote with this token. If you're an alternative health community and you'd like to curate with LOTUS, let @riverflows know!

A Good Bye - or a Brand New Beginning?

They say that all good things must come to an end.

As sad as this may be, the good things are ending here at Natural Medicine as we say goodbye to this beautiful, heartfelt, compassionate and caring collective. Started in 2018, we feel proud that we’ve been a source of abundance for many. Through curation, challenges and people just generally being awesome, we’ve worked hard to support as many people as we can. Our curators have worked tirelessly to fight plagiarism, help newbies, find support for undervalued posts, and bring excellent editorials on natural health to the HIVE ecosystem. So many people have given us the warm fuzzies for what we’ve done, and hand on hearts, we feel we’ve made a difference. But now, we arrive at our end - or perhaps just a new beginning.

A few months back, @riverflows found herself in circumstances which meant she could no longer continue to be leader of Natural Medicine. All the curators worked many, many hours to find ways to keep the community going, working out how it might be possible to keep the green lotus vibe going and spread the workload. We decided a big powerdown was needed to reimburse the hundreds and hundreds of hours that the main crew had put into the community, and the thousands of HIVE we’d put into the token and the front end. From there, we planned to redelegate to the community to keep it alive and kicking and certainly use the HIVE to reinvest into the HIVE ecosystem itself. Whilst this has been controversial, our nearest and dearest have been absolutely supportive of this, recognising how much work we have put into HIVE over the years. All of the curators who were busting a gut to reinvent Natural Medicine were also given HIVE to reinvest. Of course, there’s many ways of seeing HIVE - we can’t please everyone, though goodness knows we’ve tried.

Whilst we tried our best to find a ‘new’ Natural Medicine take hold, the pandemic has taken its toll on many of us, restructuring our lives both on and off chain in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. No one could possibly commit to what this community demands, and in some ways, we’ve been a victim of our own success. We came to realise that the amount of man hours needed to fight plagiarism, engage with people, and make sure the content was of an excellent standard and maintain community through challenges as well as upvotes, reblogs, tweets and the tokenomics was way beyond what any of us could possibly commit to. This has not been without trying our best, and our fair share of grief and heartache, and painstaking efforts to balance HIVE time and real life time with family, jobs, friends and keeping our mental health in check.

Thus, in the last fortnight, we’ve all begun the process of letting go of Natural Medicine in it's current form. The remaining funds will be powered down (save a little to keep the account voting on alternative health content for delegators) and distributed to the communities who we feel are important personally, due to our shared love of alternative content, gardening, plant medicine and so on. All the LOTUS tokens the account has earnt will be sent to @null and will be in the future, although there will be a small amount kept for curation purposes to continue distributing the token and keeping it blooming!

Whilst this might seem drastic, in all good ethics, we can’t just let the community limp on in a semi ghost mode. Many of us feel a great deal of responsibility for it and for HIVE itself, and we’d rather come out honestly and say: we’re sorry, we’ve done our best, but now it’s time for a change. Many of us are still committed to HIVE and it’s communities and feel our attention is much better directed into particular areas rather than spreading ourselves as thin as we have.

We hope that our efforts to be transparent are heard. We recognise that those who have invested in our token might be disappointed, but in the face of insurmountable difficulties and the human and financial resources needed to progress it, we simply could not find a way to make it reach its potential. We all feel a twinge of heartache that our dreams were not to be, or are at least postponed until someone comes along to make LOTUS reach the potential we were dreaming about.

However, there’s not one person in the LOTUS team that is totally disappearing on HIVE - we are around in various communities and in various roles, and we hope that in our various ways, we are still very much helping HIVE to reach it's potential, and keeping alternative health alive here as much as we can.

We're not really going, just changing.

FAQ

Q: What happens with the token?
A: Nothing! It's still going! But you'll use the tag #lotus instead to earn it.

Q: Where can I delegate now?
A: Oh goodness, we're glad you asked! There's two new #Lotus communities on HIVE - Plant Power (Vegan) and The Herbal Hive. We suggest you delegate to them! They've got support from The Abundance Tribe and are guaranteed to support #herbalism #lotus #vegan #fungimedicine #plantmedicine #herbalmedicine #plantbased content. See the links below! BUT if you want to keep your delegation to Natural Medicine, this is also a great idea - we set it up on HIVE.vote to autovote on anything that @holos-lotus, @plantpoweronhive and @theherbalhive votes on, so your vote will STILL be distributed to great alternative health content on HIVE! In fact, we'd suggest this is an awesome way to do that! And the monthly curation rewards will simply be sent to alternative health communities to power up and keep on voting!

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The Herbal Hive community and curation account is @theherbalhive

Plant Power Vegan Community and curation account is @plantpoweronhive

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We suggest @abundancetribe for meditation/esoteric content and @gardenhive (community is HIVE Garden) for your homesteading and gardening posts! You'll notice the #gardenjournal has already moved there.

Q: What about the Discord?
A: If you're in the Discord, hang around! We're just renaming it 'Lotus Tribes' - you'll find both Plant Power and The Herbal Hive there, but many of us are keen to chat about alternative health, so feel free to pop in!

Q: I still love the community and I can't find a 'natural medicine' community that fits my content as well. Can I still post there?
A: Absolutely. And if you subscribe to that community, you can still vote on the great content that appears there. Curators will still notice you. Don't forget to use the #lotus tag too!

Any other questions? We're happy to answer them - drop them in the comments below.

Much Lotus Love,

The Lotus Team.