hi ryvhnn, nice to speak to you again, been a long time! All great points. Maybe it would be better if there was one interface and you could select your preference i.e art, or healing, and then it would curate those kinds of posts. I'll check out peakd maybe. I've been working on developing community TV projects and it was going great we just had to shut down for a while because of Covid. I wanted to build it out on a blockchain solution but nothing worked better than building our own website. This is the concept. https://tweedvalley.tv/
I'm trying to find a censorship-free blockchain solution to create a social media network for the concept and everything comes up short because the onboarding and the wallet experience for new users is terrible. The only thing I've found that I like is Hylo which is something Holochain is developing and has really great onboarding (you just give people a link and they can sign up), it would be easy to build a decentralized community on, however it doesn't yet have some basic things like video embedding in posts. I also looked at some of the ones Blockstack is developing but nothing stood out. I think we're probably going to end up having to do it on a Mastodon clone instead because that's at least open source and peer to peer and censorship-resistant and very customisable and fully functioning. There doesn't seem to be anything on any of the blockchain side of social networks that works from the perspective of building communities. There's an interesting project by a couple of Australian guys in Perth called Ultra which could be cool if it lives up to some of the stuff they are promising.
I do like Hive but it always struck me as wrong that the communities that grew on Steemit like Team Australia etc. had to do it literally on third-party centralised servers like Discord.
You can already do that to a degree by following/subscribing to communities and starring tags (well you can star tags in peakd, I don't know if you can in hive.blog) but that requires a) being able to find out that you can do these things which requires not being overwhelmed by the interface and b) people using the tags you're watching and c) not tagspamming popular tags with irrelevant crap because their sole concern is more eyeballs.
Having the option/ability to split out becomes useful there as it's much easier for some people to just come into an art site or a video site or some other thing that's kind of vaguely familiar so then the resulting learning curve with the keys and having to install keychain or deal with hivesigner becomes slightly less of a cliff.
I don't know if you were familiar with hive-engine or the previous equivalent before you left, but with the ability to build all that second layer stuff (make your own website/community thing with your own token on top of hive), I don't think it becomes that necessary for users to have to know/care about hive itself unless they want to.
So in the case of your thing something you might do if you were going to build on top of hive is to use the blockchain and the wallet and write an interface that's familiar and comfortable for your target audience. Then you just have the fun of trying to explain hivesigner and keychain.
On the flip side, d.tube split off onto its own chain that just integrated hive because there was a bunch of stuff they wanted to do that apparently couldn't be done with what they had to work with. So I guess it depends a lot on what you want to do (I did have a quick look at your link and I saw a video site but didn't read any informational pages you may have had kicking around).
Only vaguely related, did you have a look at lbry already?
The other decentralised and distributed socnets that don't have cryptowallets or having to keep at least the crypto transactions on blockchain ledgers probably have it easier precisely because they don't have to do any of that shenanigans as that seems like the actual hard thing to do at this point and they've been around longer so most of them have already caught up with whatever features of the centralised things they like. The crypto socnets are getting better but still have quite a bit of catching up to do.
It's just occurred to me that you may have gotten more answers (and possibly some rage) if you'd posted into hivedevs or possibly some other hive-specific community (that's just the first tangentially appropriate one that popped into my head).
Also only vaguely related, what have you been up to aside from making community tv thingies? Or are you going to do/have already done a catchup post? :)