I listened to @pennsif's TRIBE.Talk recording yesterday, with @elipowell and @roadscape from Steemit Inc. and my friend @jongolson as a co-host.
Some interesting stuff has been said there.
The highlight, in my opinion, is that the beta version of the Hive Communities may be ready as soon as in about three weeks or so.
From the technical perspective the Hive Communities is a plugin based on Hivemind, which will show one of many possible use cases of the latter.
For community leaders and people looking at creating their own communities, the addons of interest will be in the SteemitWallet app, from where a community can be created and probably managed afterwards by admins.
For regular users (and probably moderators as well), the addons that will be more interesting to watch and get used to will be on top of steemit.com.
All this at first, because I'm sure pretty soon all other major interfaces will tap into the Hive Communities updates as well.
There is one detail on which pennsif insisted during the interview.
At the question How much will it cost to set up / create a Hive Community?, @roadscape's answer was: The amount needed to create a new account on Steem, so 3 STEEM.
That will indeed set the barrier to create new communities VERY low, and we will most likely have an inflation of new communities, most of them worthless, as roadscape indirectly admitted.
In this SPAM of new communities that will likely occur, it will be hard to identify new communities that deserve attention. Unless they are already existing and strong.
This will be one point where Hive Communities will differ from Tribes.
In Tribes, you pay to have one. Truly, you also have a token associated with it, and Hive Communities won't have SMTs for a while.
But the model is to exist a fee barrier, to not have a SPAM of tribes, and there are still quite a few of them.
In Hive Communities I think Steemit wants to introduce a sort of proof-of-community, without setting any threshold.
Do you have a community? Prove it! If you do, your community members will join, and you'll get noticed in the sea of other communities that seek attention. If you don't, you won't get noticed and you'll have a dead community.
But that's... complicated, and I foresee a number of ways some would try to abuse it. And a number of legit communities which will never lift off or will be overshadowed by others with a better front, but with nothing behind.
I'll watch with interest how this will develop, or if something will change in their approach before they'll launch HC.
Anyway, 3 weeks? Looks like they want it ready by Steemfest and maybe presenting it there! ;)