Well, since you were good enough to ask…

Let's take it a step back and have an up front question: Do you want an interface that operates on Hive?

I've seen a lot of "what we want" statements coming out of the Hive people but I haven't seen something that's important for answering your question:

What will they actually deliver for me?

What's in it for me?

Because, like most of the other creators on the Steem blockchain (and honestly, I do better than so very many others who work equally if not more hard on their content, thank you to the people who appreciate what I do), I don't see as much these days as I used to. A lot of the people who have been witnesses and developers over the last two years are also the same people involved with Hive, which makes them at some level responsible for the situation on the blockchain as it stands. I see a lot of promises but I don't see a lot of plans which include me/us beyond "here's a few fairly nebulous ideas and a whole new blockchain."

Ideally, from a creator point of view, I wanted interface that works on everything, where I only have to post once and my content is distributed to wherever people might consume it. I don't want to have to worry about what database lives underneath whatever my audience wants to use. The more the merrier, whether it be Steem, LBRY, or Hive. From my perspective as a creator the multiplicity of back ends is just a complication that I wish would go away. As long as there is some way for me to be compensated I don't care what it is.

Which brings us to another important fact about being a creator

Users who have used SteemPeak to upload pictures shouldn't be effected but how will users who used Steemit in the past be impacted with images? The URLs should still work ... but for how long?

How many tens of thousands (possibly millions) links on already established content go to Steemit.com or SteemPeak.com? I haven't run the numbers and I don't have access to a database (unlike you guys), but it's got to be more than a handful. The lack of ephemerality is/was one of the big selling points of the whole idea of being a creator on the Steem blockchain with redundant interfaces. The idea was that the content couldn't/wouldn't be able to be destroyed and, being literally interwoven block by block with all the other creations on the blockchain, reference could be maintained.

It's pretty unlikely (and by that read "bloody unthinkable") that Steemit Inc. is going to effectively make the whole blockchain unreadable, which is what would have to happen in order for that link content to go away. Are the blobs that the URLs refer to in those payloads not content interwoven with the blockchain in toto? If so, than that represents a whole different set of failures which weren't ever really put forward by the platform. (And now that I think on it, certainly weren't necessarily content stored in the blockchain proper but I'm betting that everyone who uploaded images directly to one of the platforms believed they were.)

As a blockchain reading interface, however, it's not your responsibility to read content which is not part of that blockchain. If it's there, read it. If it's not, it doesn't resolve, and it's not your problem. That sucks for resources which weren't part of the cache, but that's a problem when it comes to all sorts of web ephemerality.

And if so why? Also will there be enough 3rd party support to keep it running. And for how long do you need access... we recognize all of our users are about to be holders of STEEM tokens and HIVE tokens and need a wallet interface for both.

What kind of functionality is going to be implemented in this new spinoff blockchain that would not be inter-compatible with the Steem blockchain, as implemented in under a month? None? Then why would you need to shut down or stop operating SteemPeak at all, at any point? If you have a new name, it's trivial to point both DNS at the same site. If both blockchains have pretty much the same functionality, and there's no way in Hell that Hive will have much more in the way of functionality or even a significantly different API, the only slight challenge will be giving people the option of which blockchain to do an operation on, and that's pretty lightweight user interface stuff.

But since I have you here and while I'm asking questions, let me put one forward that I don't think I've seen anyone else actually bring up. And for the record, it's not a question which goes to your responsibility or what you (as an organization) should be doing, but one about the greater Hive blockchain design which you will become rapidly party to if you decide to become one of the major interfaces (and I don't expect do you not to):

When we signed up for Steem, most of us there Steemit Inc., we relinquished some of our rights to our content to Steem as part of the agreement for being able to access the Steem blockchain. More specifically, Steemit Inc. entered into an agreement with those who use the Steem blockchain to replicate and duplicate their copyrighted material.

The new Hive blockchain has entered into no such agreement with creators regarding their content. They have no legal grounding to replicate, duplicate, and distribute content originally intended to be posted to the Steem blockchain and part of the IP (however loosely) associated with Steemit Inc. If their intention is to duplicate the content of the entire blockchain, and if they intend to somehow be the inheritor of all of the accounts on Steem in the migration they have to be, how do they intend to justify that in a legal sense? There is no public good argument to be made, as in the case of research, and for a bunch to go on at great length about freedom from centralization and proper reward to creators that seems like a serious omission.

Copyright is held by a creator from the moment of creation onward unless otherwise legally delegated. Even if it is publicly displayed, the creator still maintains copyright holding.

Now, if Hive intends to effectively reset to a tabula rasa state with no content on the blockchain except/until this "airdrop" of Hive tokens to match the current holdings of Steem, that's not an issue – but that's not at all what I've gathered is the intention of the content of the new blockchain. Maybe it is and I simply have a misapprehension.

But, summary:

As a creator, I haven't seen a good pitch for why I should be more excited for Hive than moving to any other new social media platform.

As it's been sold, there isn't a particular advantage for me on the new blockchain because I don't hold significant amounts of Steem nor have I been getting particularly good rewards.

I want to stay on SteemPeak because I'm lazy, like most people, and it's part of my current routine to go to a singular website in order to engage with the Steem blockchain, and you would rather that I kept that routine up as would the people who really want Hive to happen as a single point of contact.

Honestly, the list of options for renaming are all pretty terrible, but the best of the lot are probably Peak.network and Peaksocial.com, end of the two the latter is so bland as to be completely flavorless.

I really don't care what chain your witnesses on because, as a user of the platform as a creator, I get screwed either way and there's nothing I can do about it. From the perspective of a social media platform engineer, your best bet is to be on both chains in order to maximize the number of people you have a good argument for bringing on board to your website.

And I think I've covered all of my concerns.

Most of the people I've seen really engaged in this discussion are either mindless Hive drones (the pun makes itself, I just recognize that) or mindless Steem boosters. I have yet to see an actual nuanced discussion of what the experience is intended or should be like for the actual user base. In that sense, I'm extremely glad to see that SteemPeak is at least asking as an organization some of the interesting questions, but I am simultaneously disturbed that they haven't been asked in a significant way before and they certainly haven't been answered.

But I appreciate the opportunity to try.