Two days ago I had the pleasure of meeting up with @go-kyo and her family! A Hive meetup of the smallest variety. Two active users and our inactive partners (@tentententen) just made a quick cameo.
We went for Indian food and I showed them around an area that I'm more familiar with.
We hardly talked crypto at all, we mostly just got to know each other better, which honestly, I think is what has been missing from my Hive life, real human interaction, OFFLINE.
I met her kids for the first time and we went to a few random shops before a flea market that @tentententen was taking part in. I was manning the shop from 4:30 until 7:00 so we had a good 3 and a half hours together. They paid for lunch and coffee so I paid them back in HBD :-D I'm always happy to use HBD!
After luck hwe went to a shop specializing in old Japanese toys like Godzilla and Ultraman and another shop selling South Asian, South East Asian and African goods, mostly Indian. We played with the instruments for a while.
Then we went to @tentententen’s exhibition and market before i had to go work for her:
Same as the first time, we got too absorbed in conversation to take pictures! Next time, I promise!
I hope we can meet each other more often and eventually get some larger groups together.
You might wonder why we don't do something to bring more activity to Hive from Japan, but I think if you spent any time in Tokyo you'd realize how hard it is. There is SO much going on, everyone is busy as hell and very few people feel comfortable talking to strangers or joining random events that they see advertised online.
@go-kyo has absolutely done her best to maintain the Hive Japan community (which is spread throughout the country), and it has not been easy. Recently she started a blog on the Japanese blog site Note.
My friends generally don't trust crypto and don't have patience for it. Some are curious and a few hold some on exchanges, but it's just an investment to them. I don't blame them either. They aren't money oriented people. They like art, and they like community and they manage to crowdsource most things to make many things possible that aren't possible in a dog-eat-dog, corporate environment, plus everyone is banked, censorship isn't as bad as it could be, and everyone prefers face to face over online interactions.
Since Tokyo is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world though, I think at least I/we could manage a kind of "welcoming committee". If you are ever in town and want to meet up, let me know. I can't promise that @go-kyo and her family will make it but I will let them know about it as well as the 2-3 other Hivesters nearby who have been harder to catch in person.
I don't know if I can go to all the popular tourist sites with you but I can show you some less well known places that are worth checking out, catering to your interests if possible, and I will make sure you have a good day or night, and I will try my best to get others out to join us.
At some point I will start organizing my own music and art related events, and once I do, I will invite certain Hivesters from overseas to come and share their art and their stories so maybe it'll spark some interest. I am sure that will work way better than just preaching about "being your own bank" or "web3 is the future" cause that is honestly not my crowd, and it's not the majority of people on this earth. Real stories from real people, doing fun stuff and finding a way to overlap it with the chain, not making it about HIVE, but making Hive available, I think that's really the way this community grows.
Instead of trying to promote Hive, I think we should just be doing fun and interesting things and creating overlap between that and what we are doing on chain. I've been saying this for years, but I've been slow to get active enough to really achieve anything and the lack of physical contact with Hivesters has made it all the more difficult.
And just as a side note, aside from our tiny meetup, there is one other reason I'm excited about Hive again. Snapie! @meno has created an iOS app (and hopefully android app in the coming weeks) that lets you access the Snaps part of Peakd, so finally we have a mobile phone app for short form.
As you may know I have been pushing hard for this for a long time, and it's one of the reasons I got involved with Leo, because they were innovating so much on the short form front. I'll still be involved with both INLEO and Peakd Snaps, despite some recent hive politics drama that I'd rather not get into again. Wherever there are people working on moving the space forward and connecting everyone, I will be. As long as I speak my mind, I will do so and try to be as non-inflammatory as possible.
@meno has made one of the most functional and needed apps on Hive in just 5 months with a tiny team of 3, on a very modest budget from the DHF, more modest than almost any other project out there, so please send him all the love you can and use the app so he's encouraged to keep working on it!
Posted Using INLEO
"You might wonder why we don't do something to bring more activity to Hive from Japan, but I think if you spent any time in Tokyo you'd realize how hard it is. There is SO much going on, everyone is busy as hell and very few people feel comfortable talking to strangers or joining random events that they see advertised online."
A very true statement. In 2018 we used to have good sized meetups here in Tokyo, 20-30 people, but market crashes. drama, etc. people just faded away. I tried about 2 years ago to get another meetup going, but no one was interested. I attribute that to your above statement. When I'm in Tokyo I can always make time to meet HIVER's too.
Was the Flea Market in Shimokita?
Thanks to @go-kyo for her constant work in trying too keep the community going and growing.
Nope in 高円寺. We will do Shimokita next month I think although last time we didn’t love the vibe of the market there. This time is a different organizer. We have some friends running an event there too, so maybe next time we will join that. I get a little emotional every time I go there cause it changed so much from when I lived there in 2010.
I’m always pretty busy but also free enough to make some time somewhere, so if you wanna meet let me know. Every time I ask you, you are overseas though, right? Haha I gotta try harder
I just remember there being a flea market there in front of the station, but I forgot they are turning it into a pick up/drop off area now.
I usually go downtown for dinner once a week if I am in town, but I'm often doing shows around the country now when I am in town so it's more like once a month. I'll be downtown Friday for work and will probably grab dinner and drinks in Shibuya. I want to see how bad the tourists are behaving.
Are you on discord? I don’t think we ever connected there.
It might be easier to meetup if we had some way to message each other. I am usually the most free on Friday or Monday
Don't use Discord anymore. Just Line basically.
A likely story XD amusingly lack of photos simultaneously seems to be "didn't happen" or "obviously in much more interesting company" XD
I remember doing a couple of meetups back in the day and then everyone vanished.
I was the beacon as usual
The apps for the chainy things need to be as easy and frictionless and braindead to use as every other social media thing that currently exists because people can't abide even the slightest hint of the possibility of discomfort with these things unless they're balls deep in sunk cost fallacy (which is probably why most of them might scream and cry and have tantrums about the sheer bloody minded idiocy being forced in over here but will comply anyway because they're desperate not to lose their access, I would much rather everyone grew a spine and found alternatives and helped everyone else find alternatives so that all these huge things could tank horribly but I'm not annoyed or bitter or anything).
Glad to hear Snapie is going well :) More useful apps are good!
”didn’t happen” = plausible deniability!
For a first build I think snapie is almost flawless. A few issues with not being able to see parent snaps and having to make an extra click to be able to comment but a fix seems to be on the way soon.
The only problem remains signup, if you can sign up as easily as you can login (and if the downvote bullies have tired themselves out) I think hive will basically be fixed.
Nice! I should look but I'm so disinterested in short form content that even though the tab is open next to this one I barely look at the snaps feed x_x
I'm trying really hard to be more interested in it but I donno
I haven't had to look at the signup process recently but I know it's been a problem in the past for people I know (of varying tech-savviness, even the ones that are very tech-savvy find it annoying/cumbersome and decide they can't be bothered). I can't even say "anything" that makes it easier would be great because some of the things that would make it easier would also probably make it less secure and apparently it's hard/perhaps impossible to have both easy and secure (I don't consider Apple as a good example of that as while it's very easy and very secure you don't control those keys).
Happy to send you high res jpegs or prose for you to circulate as part of whatever art festival you're gonna stand up :)
I am forcing things upon you, yes. :P
Send me your beard, I can put it on the wall and sell it for $350 USD
No deal
It's always great to see Hivians meeting up in the "offline" world! I love it and I have participated in plenty of meetups, but you can't get enough of them! 😃 Unfortunately, free time and travel expenses can be a barrier, but I'm doing my best...
Don't worry about having a "small" meetup... IMO, those are the best as you can know each other much better than being lost in a crowd... Bonds are stronger, and you build a nice foundation for some future, bigger meetups that you can organize with your, already met and known fellow Hivians!
I don't like that approach either... HIVE is much more than just a cryptocurrency and a blockchain; it's a vibrant community of great people! That's what we have to promote!
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All my problems get solved when I get more active....so I just need to get more active....I just need the energy and time to be more active! :-D
I wish there were more Hivesters to meet here, but before the fork, 95% of the Japan community quit and Hive never had the same word of mouth power as Steem probably because so many shitty crypto projects made a lot of curious people numb. Go-kyo took the initiative to try and keep the community alive and make it more welcoming for Japanese speakers, otherwise I'm not sure there would be anything left to revive.
These meetups are a good source of energy to be more active! They are like a motivational boost for me! 😃
Tokyo is a dream place for me, I just need the money and time and I would love to visit. Looks like such a fun meetup and it’s great to see Hive communities growing in real life
Hope you can make it here. It's definitely worth visiting at least once.
I hope so too it's so beautiful when I see it in movies and documentaries