Considering To Move Your Business To The Hive Blockchain? Don't. - An Open Letter to @justineh

RE: https://peakd.com/hive-184437/@justineh/re-travelfeed-q8j6j7

Dear @justineh,

I have dedicated the past two years of my life and large amounts of my personal funds to building one of the largest social apps on Steem: TravelFeed - a travel platform for independent travellers. Since August last year, I have been working full-time on developing TravelFeed.io and while there still is lots of work to be done, we have been making tremendous progress and have seen a decent user growth, considering that we are still at an early stage of where we want to go with our platform. I enjoy working with a team of talented people who believe in the same vision: Building a platform for independent travellers that is easy to use while sharing revenue with users, providing them with a fair compensation for their work.

If, like many of your peers, you do not know much about TravelFeed yet, I recommend you to watch my talk at the previous Steemfest to get an idea of what our platform is about and what our business plan is.

As you are aware, we announced our TravelFeed 3.0 upgrade 3 days ago, where we explained why we currently see neither Steem not Hive as fit to build our business and decided to make our platform largely independent of both chains, but support optional cross-posting to both or either blockchain while at the same continuing our curation of high-quality travel content, which we have been known for since February 2018. We were hoping for a professional and constructive conversation on what could be done to address our concerns about Hive to possibly establish the fundaments for us building closer to Hive at a future point, but instead experienced an irrational discussion with severe verbal attacks and accusations thrown at us as a business as well as at me personally by a large group of Hive stakeholders, including yourself.

Your attempt to make me look bad by sharing excerpts of conversations from the private Hive Developers Slack along with twisting my words is making me laugh. It is a sad laugh though, since I was very disappointed to be treated like this in what is supposed to be a professional environment for businesses and developers (or in other words: the people who can bring value to Hive). I stand by every word I wrote, but I would appreciate if you could put the whole conversation here since, as you are probably aware of, I no longer have access to the Hive Developer Slack and therefore have to provide any context missing from your excerpts in writing.

As anyone with technical knowledge can see from the excerpts you posted, you clearly don't have the technical skills required to understand a conversation with a developer. While this applies to most people, my problem with you is that you pretend to do and are constantly insulting me without understanding what you are talking about.

Since your first excerpt doesn't show the full context, let me explain that I never "blamed" @anyx directly for the technical issues TravelFeed experienced in the weeks before our 3.0 release. I met him at Steemfest and he is a very smart guy who is extremely knowledgeable about blockchain technology. I was honestly a bit surprised to see him and a few others who I considered to be crypto idealists supporting the 23.0 hard fork that removed funds from a list of users accounts (no, the distribution of Hive was not an airdrop, at least from a technical perspective), some of whom were included in the so-called "airdrop exclusion list" by mistake apparently, but I am sure that he had good reasons to do so, be it just supporting the lesser evil until there is a better alternative or that he - like some others - did not agree with the list, but saw it as a Gordian Knot dilemma where the circumstances of the hard fork would excuse to look over core principles. Of course I respect anyx decision to move his infrastructure to Hive.

In the conversation that you took this excerpt from, I was explaining that we were experiencing problems due to our reliance on third-parties. In TravelFeed 2.0 we wanted to give our user the option to keep full control of their private keys by implementing full Keychain support for client-side signing. To guarantee decentralisation and enable participation from other frontends, all transactions went (in most cases client-side through Keychain/Steemconnect) from the client through a node to the blockchain, from blockchain nodes to our own Hivemind node and from there back to the user through our API. That meant not only relying on the blockchain itself to work, but also relying on a lot of third-party services and nodes.

I blame myself to be so naive to rely this heavily on third-party services rather than wanting to put any blame on Steem Keychain for not updating their extension with a list of new nodes in time, or on anyx for pointing his node to Hive, since, as you are pointing out correctly, those were free services. However, both did cause problems for us due to our reliance on them. We were actually not using anyx' node for TravelFeed, but the minnowsupport node that had announced to keep supporting Steem for some more time (we did read node announcements). However, while we were mostly able to keep our Hivemind node in sync, we are not in control of client-side settings for Keychain or Steemconnect and after the hard fork, many of our users experienced the issue that their posts were not showing up on TravelFeed after posting since they had accidentally posted to Hive because they had selected a wrong node like anyx' on Steem Keychain. Our users were also affected by outages of third-party nodes that they had selected or were pre-selected in Steem Keychain or Steemconnect. To a non-technical user, this seems like TravelFeed is the cause of the issues they are experiencing, and obviously as a platform we are responsible for any outages, if they are caused by third-parties or not.

I was explaining that we had learned from that, that the price we had to pay for supporting decentralisation and client-signing is high and that we realised that we had to remove dependencies on third-party services, not primarily because also Hive nodes were experiencing problems, but mostly since we never want to be in a situation again where we see our platform rendered useless, unable to fix it since the problem lies with third-party services. This is why in 3.0 we require the users to give us posting authority. All posts go directly to our centralised database that powers all posts on TravelFeed and additionally to a transaction queue for Steem and Hive, if enabled by the user. This queue is processed by a separate microservice to push these transactions to the blockchain using the posting authority given by the user. We have the choice which node to use (or even to use our own node) and if there are outages, transactions remain in the queue and are processed at a later point. Less decentralised, but a lot more reliable since we are in control ourselves and actually a similarly centralised structure to what most topic-specific social "dApps" on Steem/Hive are using.

Even more than the rest of our delightful conversation, your second point shows that you do not understand software development. In some fields of work hiring a second knowledgeable worker might work, e.g. if you are constructing a wall, hiring a second mason might almost half the construction time. However, in software development writing code maybe takes 20% of the time, the rest is conception and dealing with bugs, but - especially when working in a team on complex projects - most time goes towards understanding existing code.
I have written all TravelFeed code by myself over the past 20 months and have been working on the TravelFeed 3.0 upgrade since February and have been rewriting large parts of our code base, working without a break for 10 days in a row to accommodate for the new changes in order to launch a new, more reliable version of TravelFeed as soon as possible. As much as I appreciate your gesture, given the possibility anyone with JavaScript coding experience would have offered us free assistance, this would have helped in the medium and long term, but not in the short term to accelerate implementing Hive support. In a complex app like TravelFeed a migration is not as easy as just changing node URLs, apart from the fact that we were sceptical that Hive could provide us the platform we were looking for. That, unlike some other apps, nobody cared to inform us of the Hive hard fork and we had to learn about it from the public announcement did not inspire confidence either.
By the way, we did get some help by @emrebeyler who provided us free access to his Hivemind node for our 3.0 migration since we were experiencing issues with ours not having indexed all tags. A big thanks to him, at least that's one thing being part of the "Hive Developer Slack" was good for.

While you may not understand my technical points, you are also constantly accusing us of disliking Hive because we did not get a delegation. I brought up the topic of delegations in our conversation since we were criticised for applying for the community delegator program by Steemit Inc. As a now independent platform, we are aiming to support users on any platform and if there was a similar program on Hive, we would have applied as well since our goal has always been to maximise rewards for our users. Over the past two years on Steem, especially when we were still "just" a curation project, we got used to almost no large stakeholder giving a sh*t about us or our efforts and we have been struggling to attract delegations to reward our users until we launch our own token that will have "real" demand among other things backed by demand for our advertising system contrary to an unsustainable inflation system. We are one of the few projects that managed to thrive on Steem without large delegations and we will continue to do so, however, while rewards have never been the only motivation for users to use TravelFeed, being able to give higher rewards to our users helps us to accelerate user growth and increase user retention, which is also great for the blockchain our users are posting to. And yes, if Steemit would give us a delegation which helps us to support our users who decide to post on Steem, it is hard to deny that they would be acting a lot more smart than you and your peers from the Hive Slack who are doing everything to make us not want to have anything to do with Hive and who are announcing to cease any support for our users, who have nothing to do with this whole discussion. I used to respect you for your work as a curator in several projects, working towards a better distribution of rewards in a broken system, are you now really supporting pushing one of the largest communities of quality content creators away from Hive?

While I used to believe in Steem due to its technology that enabled us to leverage blockchain technology fast and free while rewarding users, I have been sceptical about the marketing hype for a while. Almost like in a cult, users were conditioned with rewards to constantly praise Steem to the skies. Understandably, with an inflation-based economic system as unsustainable as the one on Steem/Hive, the only way to not let the token value go to nothing is constantly telling users to power up, not sell their funds and onboard new users to the cult who bring in new money. I fell for that as well and never sold any of my STEEM earned through posting, while even investing in STEEM in order to support TravelFeed with my delegation. The constant hype of Steem lead to many concerns being never voiced nor being addressed and while since @elipowell took over, Steemit Inc.'s skilled employees actually did a good job with releases of software like Mira, Hivemind/Communities and their work on SMTs considering the limited resources they had, with the exception of a few, technically skilled individuals, governance discussions in the community were usually long and without any result. Now, the same people are praising Hive while bashing Steem. Are you expecting me to believe that the people I had the pleasure of getting to know on the "Hive Developers Slack" are capable of developing Hive?

You and many of your peers seem to fit every criterion of extremism - Hive extremism. Extremists are unable to accept any contrary opinions or facts that don't fit in their limited field of view and are convinced that they are right since they are constantly encouraged by their peers. A constructive discussion is not possible since non-rational arguments are constantly brought forward by the extremists, without addressing the points brought forward by the discussion partner. Considering that some of these extremists are the same people that operate Hive witnesses and nodes, it makes me wonder when Hive will implement API-level censorship to prevent posts like this one from being seen or if a decision will be made to remove my funds, like it has previously been done in the Hive hard fork for accounts who had different an opinion different to the one embraced by the Hive extremists, be it just aiming for a compromise or being included by mistake.

As much as I want to believe the fairy tale that Hive is the solution to all of Steem's problems, you and your peers have shown me that Hive's issues are more severe than I had ever imagined and I have lost any belief that these will be addressed or fixed, at least not with the group of people currently in charge. There are a few skilled individuals left in the Hive Slack some of whom like me were considering building a business on Hive, please threat them with more respect than me - I still want to get a few Satoshis when I dump my HIVE.

Best,

JP