In search of the Everything App

There is lots of talk now about building a social media everything App that can do everything you need for all social media interactions. I had my doubts about if that was even possible until I stumbled upon the Amethyst App.

Currently on Hive we have 2 mobile Apps that I use regularly. Mostly I am using the great Ecency App as it is really smooth and is great for surfing and reading. It also gives great alert notifications. You can respond to most of your Hive needs using the App.

The Hive Keychain App is also good and allows you to perform most of your Hive needs on your phone too without putting your keys into your mobile browser. Storing your keys in a browser is a bad idea.

However, nothing stands still and there is lots of development in the short form and video content area of social media happening and I think this is where the everything App idea comes from. The combination of all the existing web2/web3 apps into one goto app for everything.

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Ecency has made some great advances to the Ecency App and on the Web App we now have decks with also Ecency Waves and short form content available. There is also the possibility to add videos using 3speak now which is a fantastic integration. When this gets rolled out to the mobile App it will be pretty powerful.

Lemmy World

Currently with the turmoil in the web2 space there has been lots of noise and Reddit has been one of those affected with their centralisation and blocking users and content.

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Disgruntled users have been building a new Reddit called Lemmy World which looks quite similar to the original Reddit and doesn't seem very decentralised to me.

Nostr

The biggest web3 development seems to be happening in Nostr which is a decentralised protocol where many Dapps can be used to interact with the protocol in many ways. Here is the home of many Bitcoiners and it has seen some rapid development with dozens of really great Apps created in a short time.

Mostly they have been re-creating the Twitter short form content Dapps both as web apps and as mobile apps, but there was one mobile app called Amethyst that has really got my attention because it seems very close to the everything app that would be good to see on Hive.

At first glance the homepage looks like a twitter short form content app. This is does have and you can see all the short form content interactions called notes in a nice easy to read feed.

It also has all the functions that you would want to see such as comment replies, retweet, like and zap (the equivilant to upvote on Hive) plus the view count.

However, the App doesn't stop there, it also has integration with the Zap Stream platform so you can look at current live and previously streamed streams and watch them live on your phone in the App.

Here the quality is very good and you can also see comments and leave comments, zap and interact like just as you could if you were in the zap stream platform. This would be like if we had Vimm live streaming on Hive and would be a great addition to any app I think.

The Amethyst app has even more features that you would want from a web3 mobile app, you can see a video shorts stream. Here are just short video posts to watch similar to what you would see on youtube and instagram. I know that Ecency is planning 3speak shorts integration so this would be also great to see in the Ecency App too.

The features of the Amethyst app do not end there, there is also the possibility to message directly to users and also a group messaging option which would make the use of the awful Discord redundant.

Under the menu options you have all the usual options. What is impressive about the app is that it is very fluid and provides many different type of media interactions all in one place and on your mobile.

As it is not on the blockchain, there is no wallet function, but there is still the possibility to earn. In the notifications tab, it shows you how many comments you have made, likes received and how much you have earned for today. Here I have earned 311 satoshis.

On Nostr there is no long form content as all content is produced in notes and can be long or short form. I think that long form content is an important part of Hive and should be the center of the platform, but we should have some extra streams to view short form content, group chats like discord, videos, video shorts, instagram type posts such as we have Liketu, direct messaging and the like.

Looking at the existing trends, this seems to be the direction we are heading in and I am looking forward to seeing more development on Hive to bring us towards this goal, especially the launch of Ecency waves on mobile.

Credits:

Screenshots from the Amethyst app unless specified. Title image created in canva using free mockup feature.

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