"Hive Headaches": Onboarding Newcomers to Web3 is More Challenging Than I Thought it Would Be
There's no crypto talk that I engage in with any new person without mentioning Hive. It's been a part of my life for almost six years, shaping me in numerous ways. I carry it with me everywhere, and I make an effort to spread the word about it as much as possible.
During the holidays, an acquaintance and his girlfriend visited, and although she isn't deeply involved in crypto (unlike the guy), she expressed interest in learning more about Hive. Being into makeup and content creation, she was keen on exploring the platform for potential monetization opportunities.
Seeing her interest, I guided her through the process of creating an account and initiating her journey on Hive. However, it proved more challenging than I anticipated. For me, using Hive feels second nature after six years of having my account, with saved keys and seamless access on both my laptop and smartphone.
When attempting to onboard someone from the Web2 world to Web3, it wasn't a smooth experience. Our first attempt on hive.blog encountered some issues (I don't recall specifics), and subsequent efforts with the Ecency app, where she paid around $3 for her account, yielded no results.
Facing these setbacks, I remembered @leofinance's leoinfra feature, and we successfully created her account using it. Despite saving her keys, attempts to log in on Hive.blog, Peakd, or Ecency with any of her account keys resulted in a persistent "wrong username or password" message.
This left me genuinely speechless. As a long-term Hive user, I considered myself the go-to crypto guy who should facilitate a smooth onboarding process. Apparently, it's not as easy as I thought.
Reflecting on my own journey, I recalled that it took two weeks to receive the confirmation mail from Steemit when I created my account. Yet, my acquaintance's girlfriend, using @leofinance-generated keys, couldn't log in. If anyone has a solution, I'm eager to hear it and assist her in accessing the platform through her preferred interface.
While she can post through Leofinance, attempting to choose a different community, such as makeup power, results in a perpetual "loading" status without displaying any available communities. Though she can publish content without associating it with a specific community, for better exposure in her niche, joining a makeup-related community would be ideal.
We often discuss the goal of bringing masses to Hive, but if onboarding a single person proves this challenging, how can we expect to attract a larger audience? Personally, I've struggled to bring any real-life friends or acquaintances onto Hive, and today's attempt left the girl frustrated.
Perhaps attempting to log in from a web browser might resolve the issue, but I'm unsure. I'll inquire about her progress during our next meeting. For now, she's unable to interact with the blockchain except through the Leofinance interface, which itself is not fully functional.
I've done my best, and I hope we can overcome these hurdles so she can become a Hiver. Any suggestions or words of advice are welcome.
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian
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Much appreciated
Well you can always use Leo Infra to get your Hive account, claim your keys and use afterwards any UI to post (with Hive KeyChain). PeakD should be the way to go as it is very flexible in my opinion.
Exactly what she did. The problem is that after she got her keys she could not login into any other interface.
I agree, this is definitely a major issue. I tried to onboard my wife - creating an account on Ecency through a referral link was okay, but nowhere near as signing up on a Web2 platform where you just need a username, email address and password to get started.
LeoInfra isn't a possibility for her, she's avoided social media on Web2 due to the absolute lack of privacy there, so there's nothing she could use to sign up to Hive with there.
But even after signing up, there's very little help available. Plenty of people have written useful posts, but if you are new to Hive, you won't know how to search for them or what questions to ask. Even something as simple as uploading a profile picture is a headache. There's no guidance on image sizes built into the platform, and I think Ecency was having one of it's regular days where the image server was glitching out.
End result; my wife has given up on the idea. It makes me think this is a common problem. It needs to be sorted out, but getting a bunch of decentralised front ends to do it is likely to be impossible.
Whoever makes an everything app for Hive in the true sense of the word will be a clear winner.
Definitely ! The Hive ecosystem has so many useful and interesting things in it. We just need some kind of hub that includes help and guidance, and acts as an easy-to-use directory to everything that's out there.
But I have no idea how we do it in a way that keeps it decentralised while at the same time getting all the apps, dapps, games and front ends to include obvious links to it so that it can act as a true hub or navigation tool.
I guess those are the pitfalls of decentralized blockchains.
I haven't gone through an entire sign-up process in quite a while to know what is the best method that works right away. But her, specifically, I can help. I can create a full account for her, I've done it more than once for others. If you want to be the intermediary, contact me on discord and tell me her chosen username (make sure it's available), and I'll create the account and send you the private keys, so you can give them to her. Then, you show her how to change them (the easiest is via PeakD, I think).
She has an account, actually two. Problem is that when she tries any of the keys to login to hive.blog or peakd from her iPhone it doesn't work...
Maybe there's an issue with the process of claiming the accounts, if both of them were initially lite accounts.
Both were initially lite accounts.
I thought so. That's why I offered to create a full account for her.