Crypto social media (for artists) #1 - CREARY

This might not be a popular series on steem, to point out alternatives to our system here, but I'm curious about what other crypto social media projects are out there, in particular those which empower artists.

Each project I look at, I'll review it in its current state and take a look at what the project has planned.

The first project I'll be posting about is CREARY which is the first dApp on CREA 2.0 (creative chain).
The other night I tried out their beta, you can see some of my response to this test and their beta announcement post here:

Now CREA already launched but have had issues with their chain, and have decided migrating to graphine will be a better fit for what they are trying to do. What I will be reviewing is CREARY that is built on the CREA graphine architecture, the same as STEEM. So in many ways the way the system will work is identical to how steem functions. They have changed a few mechanics on powering down (it's a shorter power down), but essentially they have decided to fork steem and keep many of the general features the same. This particular front end adds features like built in IPFS to handle media, and other things directly related to artists, like built in creative-commons licencing!

Immediately the way user profiles and post pages are set up is refreshing. It's intuitive, there are links to other work by the same author automatically, it was designed by someone who gives priority in how visual elements should look on a web page. This is all really great for artists, especially compared to all of the interfaces for steem so far.

Their plans for this interface seem to be an online portfolio, as well as asset management. Like I said they have built in creative commons licencing by default, allowing you to set what types of permissions you allow others on your work. This could lead to some really fun re-mix art games in the future. This is also the basis for creating an asset library, allowing users to sell images. You could create a stock image/video library, or sell digital prints this way.

What can they improve?

I hope they will put some effort into a better search engine than steem, and also a more interesting way to browse content. Right now they have defaulted to essentially the "trending - new hot -promoted" sections which steem provides, I think this is really rather uninteresting - I wish steem didn't do it, and it makes even less sense for an artist platform. A bigger issue to address (and more complicated) I hope they address some of the voting/reward distribution problems that steem has. This might be possible if they put effort into hiring curators rather than relying on the free market to curate. I realize it's a blockchain but I think there can be some middle ground, and is essential for a platform like this (as can be seen from the growth of projects like CURIE, and c^2 collective, and in a negative sense the widespread use of voting and delegation bots).
Other issues they will face are around the economics. They are already swapping chains, partly due to hyper inflation on their old system, but they are adopting the 3 token model which steem holds, steem, steem power and steem dollar, only on their system they are called "CREA - Crea Energy (CGY) - Crea Dollar (CBD)". In my opinion this model has failed, the SBD pegged token spends more time above or below the dollar than any where near it. Some have suggested that steem drop SBD in the past as it unnecessarily complicates the steem ecosystem. What will make their system different? That said, a pegged currency is essential for adoption, especially to attract outside users who have little or not interest in the mechanics of crypto.

So far i'm really excited for what they are doing, and will follow them for updates on their project in the future.

There were some bugs, this is all on testnet right now so I won't linger on the problems that I had. Another user has had trouble in the sign up process, so beware and if it doesn't work come back later and try again.

Inheriting distribution problems of steem?

Besides the interface and the blockchain tech, an extremely important part of the equation is the distribution of this chain. What type of chain is this going to be, is it really decentralized? These types of issues are tearing steem apart right now, so it's important to look into these things before putting a lot of time and effort in creating a portfolio on a new platform.

I asked about the distribution on their announcement for a beta test and got this reply also posted below. My main concern is that this year of hyper inflation might create some similar issues with distribution that steem has. I haven't looked into the accounts on the platform, and i'm making no allegations at this time, i'm just suggesting that it is important to look into this further to understand the economic makeup of this system, whether it will be a crypto democracy or a veiled oligarchy. At a glance however it seems to be a system with a lot of opportunity.

Hi! We're sorry for having missed your reply.
First of all, thank you for testing the platform and sending us your feedback!
To download the wallet please visit https://creaproject.io/downloads-en/ and check the section "Download QT wallet" (black banner), so you don't need to download the whole platform 1.0 if you only need the wallet.
This is our block explorer 1.0: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/crea and we are already building the block explorer 2.0, we will publish it soon.
The CREA team is part of a non-profit foundation (Creativechain Foundation) and the project is completely open source.
Token distribution will be 70% to content creators and curators, 15% to the CREA holders and 15% to the witnesses.
There will be 25 witnesses voted by the community (users can vote up to 35 witnesses). We will encourage witnesses to make suggestions for improvements in the network so that users vote for witnesses who have better proposals. This encourages the collective creation of the project.

Please check this article about the token distribution: https://creaproject.io/distribution-and-supply-of-cryptocurrency-in-crea-2-0

We have made our blockchain for many reasons. First and most important is to create a network that allows to make the implementations that the creative sector needs such as the license registration system or the marketplace of p2p downloaded contents within the platform using the IPFS network.
Many other features in CREA are different from STEEM. For example, in Creary the rewards are paid in 8 weeks instead of 13.
You can check more in the code: https://github.com/creativechain/crea
Also, you can see more answers about the platform in our FAQ section: https://test.creary.net/faq

Hope these answers help you understand better the project!
Thanks again for your support.

Best regards

I asked for a bit more information on discord about their initial distribution, This is important because of the issues on steem with an imbalance of stake.

12226641 CREA were created in an ICO (crowdsale) back in May 2017, 8M were distributed to investors, 3M to the team/foundation and the rest, about 1,2M has been distributed in bounties, art challenges and rewards.
The remaining CREA until the current +18M have been mined
The coin swap ratio will be 1:1

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