Darkrooms, chemicals, prints & exhibitions!
If you had told me as a photographer in the late eighties that I'd be able to post my work online and receive uncensorable micropayments from all over the globe these days it would be hard to even start relating to that, even for someone deep into both tech & scifi.
Yet here we are! For me its now already 6 years since I had my first trial runs in this new, freedom based, global economy!
My experience with Minds
I registered my first account a bit into 2018, or maybe it was even earlier. At the time I had followed Bitcoin and parts of the crypto space since maybe 2014, and now there was something I really wanted to use to share exactly what I wanted.
At the time I had a couple of companies running, one was a B2B photography and later video production agency, so I was working full time with content and the tech aspects of it all every single day.
And this is what made Minds a perfect outlet for my own, private photography. In a way this was also part of my work, as a musician still has to train & explore in order to perform when it is time for that.
Sharing whatever I wanted and receiving Minds tokens was a great experience, even though the value of those didn't amount to more than a cup of coffee at my peak.
Why? Well we probably have a part of our brain and mind that is hardwired to appreciate and follow real rewards, and in a modern world something that in theory can scale into maybe a partial income is a powerful, emotional reward on its own.
But also the freedom was great, even back when I did music photography with some sponsored exhibitions I could not totally do whatever I wanted, there was of course expectations along with the budgets.
A bit later Minds had a huge influx of Vietnamese when censorship there got worse, and it seemed that the platform might really make it. Then of course the bear market put a stop to the growth and monetary value of the network.
But it is still around! Who knows if it will somehow get re-capitalized when we get into the next leg of this bullmarket, I will watch that closely for sure.
What can minds.com be used for as it is? I've posted a bit now and then, but won't do much with it until I get around to setting up my own website. When there is time for that I might buy some very cheap Minds tokens to then boost my old account and see what that might lead to :-)
I do hope Minds makes it, we need lots of different platforms dedicated to open source and freedom!
Odysee and the LBRY token
Next up was of course Odysee, I might even have signed up before the rebranding. For a while I spent my time watching content, and got a bit of token that way. Also it was very valuable to see who and what type of creators that included it in their routines, for a while it was a very exiting space!
I did get around to doing some rebellious videos there, which led to initial contact with some of the creators that have a larger following, and I really wanted to push it.
Then of course the SEC killed it, in an essential illegal decision, maybe there was even some fear of what it might grow into?
I did buy quite a bit of the LBRY token maybe around 2022 to market what I planned to produce, I guess the value of that is gone now, but now that Odysee is reconfiguring with Arweave I'll have to somehow get my old login to see...
Odysee is still around, and if they manage to integrate well with Arweave which is a permaweb storage solution it might do very well!
Nostr and Stacker News
I got started on Nostr a little while after good client were developed, and for around half a year I put all my "new tech energy" into the space. It was, and probably is, very promising, especially since its a protocol that can't be stopped easily!
What happened is that I connected with a lot of smart people, even getting close to maybe finding those 1-2-3 partners I'd need to star a new entity, my goal was to "bridge" my old co-op over into something new, it would have been a perfect and safe platform for doing something real in the space
At least part of the reason why this did not happened was the reasonable paranoia and fear that most have in the Bitcoin space, of course micropayments in the form of Bitcoin sats was integrated in everything I did there.
The main effort was in an account that I put an ancap spin on, a sort of super early startup push. I ended up donating what I got to stray dogs, buying cans for the sats I received and then posting pictures from when I distributed that. I still have enough left in that to buy 20-30 cans, and will get around to doing that for sure.
My account for pure photography was easier to keep up, far less complicated but also more limited. I will keep that one, and could see it as a good platform for selling limited, archival quality prints. The Bitcoin space often appreciates quality and real work, so it could be a good fit!
So far I have only used Stacker News a bit for photography, its not the best platform, but it is there and I will watch it. It could be a good place to crosspost articles on photography for me, like this one.
Hive
Last is Hive, since what I have written so far is the background for what I want to do on Hive the next weeks, not the other way around!
I have not been really active here, although I really want to. The main reason is that I'm still prototyping my workflow as well as rebuilding both the knowledge and personal takes on what I will be doing the coming years, like an elevator pitch for myself.
Also I do have a lot of old contacts in meatspace/Linkedin that I know can be very valuable when I start "recycling" them after being completely off their map for ~4 years now. In 2020 I stopped using Linkedin, leaving only " Bitcoin. Did you get any?" ;-)
So I need to get all of this mapped out and well planned, especially since I know it takes years to rebuild & rebrand yourself properly. Also I need to have an answer to any curveball anyone might throw at me, as well as relevant experience in blockchain publishing, micropayments and all relevant tech.
Hive has been great since I can see a way forward to actually doing totally what I want, long format writing like this, combined with photography and soon video. But I did have to see if it survived the bear market, simply since there is a lot of time going into all of this, if I include Bitcoin it has easily been full time for years :-)
But now is the time to really get into producing and publishing content! Some of my previous posts have made ~7-15 dollars worth of payments, which is very promising even without building a large following. But the real question is if I can scale that... Can I get into a consistent routine, and also add as many alternative platforms as possible to stay resilient worst case?
If I can manage this, and also get the meta-analysis like this right, then there will also be different types of consultancy work out there. For that I need actual proof of experience of course.
So I totally need to take Hive for a real test drive now! ;-)
Something that has been holding me back a bit are the rather byzantine aspects of how the internal economy functions. I won't get into any details here, and probably not too much later, and I know from decades of experience that any space with lots of people has its own hierarchies, social challenges, taboos and whatnot.
This is all OK, I will just learn, adapt & grow within that. The only thing that I find a bit negative has nothing to do with Hive on its own, but rather all of the space: it seems to me that it can be hard to crosspost content across all platforms, there is a tendency to create silos or even echo chambers...
The Bitcoin space is by far the worst on this haha! Hopefully Hive is far better, that is actually necessary for it to make it long term :-)
Frustration & promise
So the frustration is of course that it takes a lot of time to scale these things, we might still have to wait for a few year where most dedicated creators can at least build a resilient, consistent income.
The promise is that we have all the tools we need now! So the thing is to "bridge the gap" into a new, unstoppable and uncensorable, global economy, where I certainly hope that Hive will be a major player for years to come!
