Rosarito eh?
If you were to ask me about any other city in which HiveFest was hosted over the years... I wouldn't be able to tell you. In fact I may have even engaged in actively ignoring the event. Could be interesting to go back in time and look at the posts I was writing during previous HiveFests. I guarantee I've never written a post about HiveFest, which I'm now realizing is super odd behavior considering the entire point is extroverted in nature: creating communities and even entire economies.
The reason for this is probably some kind of combination between extreme introversion fused with the inability to actually attend the event. Maybe if it was hosted on the East Coast we'd be having a different conversation. I not 100% sure but I seem to remember that it was hosted here at one point. Then again I was living in California at that time so there is that.
I actually went to college at SDSU (San Diego State University). It's weird to think if I still lived there it would only be a 45 minute trip across the border to get there. Pretty wild. Of course back in those days you didn't even need a passport to cross the border as an American citizen, so you might say it's been a while.
Pointless side-story:
I remember this one time we took a friend to Tijuana and really hyped up how insane the taxi drivers are down there. During that specific trip our particular taxi was quite tame, and our buddy was quite disappointed and thought we were bullshitting him. So on the way back to the border we tipped our taxi $20 to drive "extra crazy"... and this guy did not disappoint. It was like a car chase from a movie scene. Oh yeah also the taxis don't have seatbelts, lol. Luckily they were built like tanks back in those days. Of course now I just feel like an old man telling some off-topic story from a time long past. Punk college kids performing punk college kid shenanigans.
What was I talking about again?
I see a lot of naysayers on Hive calling it a dead platform. So I'll see someone create a post and then the comment on that post will be "Hive is dead" and then a conversation ensues about how Hive is dead or not. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain why that's kind of funny and ironic.
These types of voices seem to get a lot more attention during bear markets where the price is near all time lows (along with the active userbase). After all we are down 90%+ from the last peak, and only a 17% dip away from local bear-market lows.
Certainly it is true that Hive is a very small niche community that is largely disconnected from the world of Bitcoin & EVM technology. Hopefully this is a temporary embarrassment, and coincidentally enough this is exactly what's being talked about on the YouTube livestream of HiveFest. Creating a bridge to other networks (even just liquidity bridges and permissionless exchange) is a pretty important development.
Then there are those that claim that Hive is a plutocracy unilaterally controlled by the biggest stakeholders. These elites in turn flex their power and use their influence to further aggrandize themselves, essentially exploiting the poor for their own benefit just like the legacy system we are trying to replace.
This is a particularly hard viewpoint to engage with because it runs completely contrary to my own personal experience on the platform. Anyone can click on the trending tab and see the posts with the biggest payouts. I tend to make the cut quite often. You know who I don't see on trending? The biggest stakeholders and witnesses.
Sure, every once and a while a dev will post about all the work they did over the last two months, and posts like that can get massive payouts. They're also few and far between and often well-deserved. Point being is that I often don't see much evidence backing up what a lot of users are worried about, so it's difficult to take seriously even when these issues are obviously possible and shouldn't be casually dismissed.
What exactly do you say to someone who assures you that Hive is failing when your own personal experience is a modest amount of success? Tough dialog, that. It's also hard to take seriously when these same people claim that Hive is on the verge of complete systemic failure and collapse. As someone who lived through the 2019 bear market rampage it's pretty obvious that we aren't even close to that level of desperation.
Point being that seeing pictures and watching the conferences from the ongoing HiveFest make it even more difficult to be bearish on the network. Yeah... we're a very small band of rebels and certainly things could have worked out better up to this point, but we have what we have, and what we've got is a pretty dedicated and zealous community willing to make sacrifices to keep this thing we got going. Of course such dedication can also be spun into a story of "blind delusion". All just a matter of perspective I suppose.
Conclusion
Now is not a very timely moment to have a defeatist attitude. It is very difficult to guess where this is all going, both on the Hive side and just crypto in general. Surely we have to expect there will be many more hardships and hurdles to overcome over the next decade, but is there really another option other than to carry on and keep grinding forward? In a weird way I see HiveFest as an expression of this inevitable fate. Keep grinding forward, fam.