Hive history in a nutshell: Justin Sun attempted to take over Steem governance, the community revolted, and gave birth to Hive.

When Hive forked from Steem, the ninja-mined stake that was always problematic in Steem was then converted to a Hive worker proposal system called the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF), which completely removed the problem of too much Steem being owned by one person. This Hive DHF functions as a worker proposal system that anyone can receive if enough votes are cast on your proposal. Read more about the Hive fork and what caused it: @lukestokes/how-steem-became-hive

See the Decentralized Hive Fund here: https://peakd.com/proposals
If you’re a developer, marketer, entrepreneur or have a great idea to build, consider submitting a proposal for the Hive community to vote on.

One thing about Hive makes it way different from mainstream social media sites and it’s this: you have to think of Hive like an operating system, not a standalone social site.

Hive is the backbone upon which many different social media sites are built upon. So for this reason, it’s a bit more difficult for new users to grasp, because it’s an entirely new paradigm. Most people are conditioned to think of standalone social sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc, and they think of them as individual companies, who are owned by different individuals. These social sites share no common backbone. They use servers which are controlled by other companies.

Hive https://hive.io/about is a decentralized system which is running in the background, and there are many different social media sites that use the Hive system to: store data, send money, store posts and comments, do transactions. In order to make things as easy as possible, we will be recommending only certain sites that we think are the best and easiest for new users.

For example, if you’re a blogger, you’ll probably prefer using https://peakd.com/ over https://hive.blog/ because Peakd is built for content creators, is more visual and has a ton of rich features that hive.blog doesn’t have.

But they both use the Hive blockchain to process data and retrieve data. This is an example of just how different they are from Facebook. And the list goes on from there with many different dapps also using the Hive blockchain to process their data. Check out the full list of Hive dApps here: https://hive.io/eco/

QUICKSTART GUIDE: If You're Brand New To Hive

If you're brand-new to Hive and need a free account, we think the easiest way to get a free and instant Hive account is with Hiveonboard.

Watch this Youtube video to get started with Hive:

Here are some other options for you if that doesn’t work: https://signup.hive.io/

We also suggest that all new users do the following after they have created a new Hive account (after saving your private keys to a usb stick):

Write a post introducing yourself and make sure to use the #introduceyourself tag.
Join 3 Communities that interest you: https://peakd.com/communities
Follow @hivepeople on Hive and tag us in your #introduceyourself post so that we can find and upvote you.
Join the Hive tech support channel in Telegram: https://t.me/hiveblockchain
Follow @hivepeople and @hivetrending on Twitter and tag us in a tweet if you need help with any of the steps above: https://twitter.com/HivePeople

Mobile Phones

If you want to use a mobile phone for the Hive blockchain, then your option is to use the Esteem app https://esteem.app/. Don’t get confused by the name of the app or its branding. I was originally created to be used for the Steem blockchain, hence its name “Esteem”, but it has since moved over to Hive.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.esteem.mobile.android

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/esteem-v2/id1451896376

Esteem also has a desktop version, and this link takes you to all the downloads: https://esteem.app/about#downloads

If you have issues, go to the Esteem app Discord channel: https://discord.me/esteem

QUICKSTART GUIDE: If You Had A Steem Account But Want To Switch To Hive

The main thing you need to know is that your Steem private keys are identical to your Hive keys. Just log into Hive using your Steem existing keys, and you don't need to make a new Hive account.

For Desktop Go To: https://peakd.com/

All you need to do is to log into https://peakd.com/ using your existing private keys.

When you visit peakd.com, you are given a few ways to log in. We recommend you get the Brave/Chrome or Firefox extension for Hive Keychain. We have been using Hive Keychain since the beginning and it’s both super easy and safe. This method is for those who want to use a desktop computer.