How is Hive doing with Communities these days? Communities are an essential feature of the Hive ecosystem as they allow for easy content discovery and finding specific topics that users are accustomed to. Almost all content is posted in some community that is later used by users to filter content, or by curators to support authors and communities.
If we combine communities with the possibility for easy tokenization, communities’ tokens, and provide tools for users to monetize, things can become very interesting. We are seeing some interesting development from InLeo integrating Dash etc.
There have been some well-established communities on Hive, and some new coming in. Some of the communities already have their token on Hive Engine.
Here we will be looking into the following things:
- Number of communities created
- Top communities by number of subscribers
- Top Communities by activities
- Top communities subscribers’ stake
- Top communities by active authors
Communities went live officially in February 2020, but they were in a test phase before that.
The period that we will be looking here is from November 2019 till now.
Number of Communities Created
First let’s look at the total number of communities created with time.
We can notice the spike in the number of communities created is quite visible in February 2020 when they launched. Afterwards the number dropped and lately there are few communities created per day.
In the last period there have been a few communities created, usually is bellow 5 per day.
If we look at the monthly chart, we get this:
More than 300 communities per month as ATH number, while in the last months there is between 20 to 40 communities created per month.
There are now more than 4k communities on Hive.
Top Communities by Number of Subscribers
Who are the top communities on the blockchain?
We will be looking at this with more than one parameter, but for starters let’s take a look at the most obvious one, the number of subscribers.
Here is the chart.
The GEMS community comes first with 23k subscribers, followed by OCD. Photography lovers, Leofinance and Foodies are in the top as well all close to the top one with 22k subscribers. The subscribers’ numbers to the communities keeps growing.
Top Communities by Subscribers’ Stake
Another interesting way to rank communities is the stake of their subscribers. After all we are on a DPoS chain.
What is the stake weight of the subscribers in each community?
Here is the chart.
In this type of ranking the HiveDevs community comes on top with 53M HP. OCD, LeoFinance and GEMS come next.
Top Communities by Activity
The number of subscribers in a community and their stake is important. But more important probably is how active the communities are.
Here is the chart for the top communities by the number of posts and comments made in 2024.
The red is the number of posts, while the white is the number of comments.
We can see that LeoFinance, or Inleo as the new brand stands, is on the top here, and by a lot. This is mostly because of the short form content and the blogging happening there. On the second spot is the other shortform community by PeakD, Snaps. Actifir comes on the third spot. Some other know communities as Worldmappin, Photography Lovers, Splinterlands in the top as well.
Top Communities by Active Authors
What about active authors? Here is the chart for November 2024. The MAUs.
These are accounts that have made posts or comments in the community.
Leofinance comes on the top with 2.6k active members in November 2024. Actifit is next followed by Photography Lovers.
Overall, the number of new communities created has plateaued between 20 to 40 per month. The GEMS community is still leading with the number of subscribers, while the Hive Devs community has the HP power. InLeo has now emerged as the community with the most activity in terms of posts and comments and in terms of active authors.
All the best
@dalz
The Leofinance community is very effective in many categories. It is clearly ahead in terms of active writers.
It was a surprise to me that there are around 200k posts and comments in the community and it is 180k ahead of the 2nd ranked one. It seems to be due to the fact that threads are used a lot.
Thanks for putting this information together! As a user returning from 2021, it's been frustrating seeing how much of the content I find here is about crypto, or Hive itself, when there are so many ways that other communities could form, and be supported by these existing communities.
It would definitely be nice to have more varied content indeed. I have plans to start a community that has nothing to do with crypto, but lacking the time at the moment. Hopefully soon
I think that's probably a part of the problem, overall: folk who are doing things that aren't crypto, might not be on the computer as much as folk who are, so just, not able to get around to cultivating a community here with the same attention that the crypto communities can.
At least, that's my experience. Personally, I was living off-grid, in a tent, without electric or Internet, for the past year, doing regenerative agroforestry on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the most economically desolate place in the United States. Even checking my email was a big hassle; taking the time to bring my perspectives to someplace like Hive just wasn't possible.
Now, through the winter, I'm someplace with electric and Internet, so looking at what the possibilities are, but am concerned that without the support of the wider Hive community, any attempts to form an ecologically focused community will stagnate, or remain on the margins, like other special interest groups (except crypto) on Hive seem to be.
I'm planning to try it anyway, because I think there's something real and important to synthesize between the decentralized technologies of blockchain and Indigenous-informed land stewardship, but, I expect it to be a learning experience more than anything useful.
I think you are 100% right
My community will probably be a ghost town also but I'll give it a go
Be prepared that it is going to take a lot of and effort before your community will be active. It's also wise to check out whether other people already make posts about the subject you want to create a community for in other communities.
Oh yea, I know for a fact they post about it on other communities. Part of the challenge will be bringing them to my communitie instead
What I did was upvote their post with my community account and reply with a banner and link to the community.
That helped growing mine.
That's a good idea! Thanks for sharing your learnings!
A big problem with a lot of the communities is that the non-crypto/Hive ones just don't have the interest from either posters or curators. No curation means less posters, less posters of course means less curation. A lot of those bigger communities that aren't crypto/Hive related are simply cruising by purely because they're part of bigger curation initiatives people have set up.
It might seem trivial, but I really appreciate this validation. I wrote what I felt was a decent post for what I found as the largest agricultural community on Hive, and as near as I can tell... no one even saw it! (Linking it here because maybe folk can tell me that I did something wrong.)
I simply do not want to contribute my writing to the corporations of Web2. Beyond their inability to have anything but an extractive relationship with content creators, I don't trust them to not end up deleting what I write!
But unless something changes about Hive, I don't see there being a way to retain folk like me. The only engagement I get is if I talk about crypto or Hive stuff, and my interest in that stuff is only because of what it might mean for creators of non-crypto content!
That, combined with other tensions within communities here, and all of this being the same problems I encountered when I was here a few years back, has me worried that Hive is going to end up having its rug pulled by the currently big accounts, as folk get tired of the stagnation.
I have already seen that many of these more niche communities have dried up quite a bit in the past year. A lot less activity than there used to be, both in the number of posters and the weekly rewards being distributed to them. It's normal that with cycles some of the general interest dries up and returns with price action, but I don't seem to be seeing that interest returning. I also noticed a very large chunk of the people I followed had just stopped posting when they were some of the most active people I saw around. I don't think that was necessarily price action but people just leaving for other reasons.
There is a lot of weird stuff on Hive, and it's hard to not notice. You'll see people that never comment or curate any other posts getting supported every single post they make, but then you look at the communities they're posting in and they're a wasteland in which nobody else gets curated. Or you'll see a post that is genuinely incredible and evident of significant effort and they'll barely break a dollar while a post published 5 mins later will get instant rewards. Obviously the rewards side of Hive isn't promised and not every post can be a hit, but there isn't much effort to really even things out in that sense. It's why this place doesn't see really big posts and especially high effort video content.
Hive is a not a place where effort results in rewards. It is purely luck. Some are luckier than others.
My concern isn't really that Hive dries up, people will come and go either way. I have the higher concern that we're all too reliant on Binance and our generally lowish trading volume could spark interest in a delisting. Projects with more volume have already seen that fate.
Also some quick advice for you: keep posting about the things you like. Absolutely do not put too much time and effort into posts since you'll definitely burn out. Keep posting in different communities and find those areas of interest you may have here. Things will pick up over time. Posts with images will also get a bit more attention. You don't have to change what you write about or how you write it, but presentation generally does help gain an eye or two.
One of the problems with other communities is that people don't notice them en post in the general GEMS community.
I'm running a community (Cycling Community) myself and it quite hard to make your community known to your target audience. I've been running my community for long time now and have done some promotion by upvoting cycling posts in other communities and refering to Cycling Community.
A lot of niche communities are in the OCD incubation program and with that support community owners can nominate blogs in their communities that may receive OCD upvotes. So posting in niche communities that have OCD support can get you some nice rewards.
But you do have to check whether the community you are posting in is still active.
Yeah I can imagine something as niche as cycling would be a constant struggle to grow. Especially when a lot of cycling posts are probably quite similar to photography ones and result in people posting in other communities more photography focused.
The OCD stuff is a good idea for giving communities a bit more interest through the curation side of things but it's only really a temporal solution. Get too big and your community is out to which the problem returns as curation dwindles. It's also quite a time and effort extensive concept for a lot of people with all the responsibilities of reading through posts, checking the accounts, nominating, etc.
Things like commentrewarder are a great idea since that doesn't entirely rely on a large group of people doing a ton of things all at once, and it definitely does improve some engagement. I don't think there's a specific solution to any of this though, I don't think it's necessarily a problem of specific groups or individuals not pulling their weight but more just the fact that Hive really is still in its infancy. If niche communities are struggling to chug along then it's usually just a case of low interest. And the low interest of course ripples into things like curation rewards which don't help things. But even if we had 1000 people posting daily in one community, it wouldn't mean much if none of them had the HP to upvote each other. Fatigue would still be inevitable.
OCD is great. It takes a while to grow too big for OCD support though. And in the meantime I keep growing the stake of my community account and gathering delegations to increase the upvotes and curation rewards.
Commentrewarder is also nice, but it needs to be done by the author itself.
I'm playing with the idea to setup a curation service to rewards comments, but I need some time to develop.
Awesome work as always sir, thanks for all you do!
Tnx back :)
Nice to see how busy it is over there at LeoFinance.
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Wow, over 4k communities on HIVE. That's quite a lot!
The LeoFinance community is very popular and has a lot of active authors. A lot of posts are made in Gem community so it is also very strong. Many communities have been built on Hive But the problem is that most communities do not have their community Voter. Very informative post
The more communities there are, the more people will have more choices and will post in the communities they like and we hope that will support them. I also use Leo Finance, I post one a week, the community is very nice and supportive.