My quest to expand the @socalsteemit group in the San Luis Obispo area. 

I was asked by @derekrichardson if I could start a Meetup in the San Luis Obispo area to gather more people in the northern area of southern California. Considering I lack any originality and time to start from scratch I decided to piggyback off an already well-established blockchain group. Pretty much how I make it in life. Its called The blockchain Initiative, the group meets in downtown SLO every two weeks.

I had a great time with the SLO Blockchain Initiative. I walked into Kreuzberg, a nice cafe in downtown SLO and found the group sitting at a large table discussing decentralizing the power grid and the Internet of Things (IoT). It was refreshing to jump right into a conversation about IoT's and if existing centralized companies will adapt or stonewall new industries. Personally, I am the one trying to get people to talk about things like this. I enjoyed not having to defend or explain what a cryptocurrency was. The discussion was all about the tech of blockchain and its applications, so no shilling of coins. We just talked about Blockchain stuff. No "sounds like a bubble" or "that is a pyramid scheme". Like I said quite refreshing. 

We introduced ourselves and talked about our passions in the blockchain field. I shared about how and when I got started with steemit and eventually my amateur crypto trading. After the introductions, I shared about the steem blockchain. I talked about subjects and answered questions as they came. The group was very helpful and receptive. I tried not to dwell on all the drama that was going on in Steemit. After I left I laughed at myself for talking about all the things wrong with steemit. If I was a salesman for steem my family would go hungry. In the end getting people to join is not about converting them but showing them how awesome it is, even in its brokenness and they join because it sells itself. By sharing my blog (how little I earn) and my critical viewpoint of Steem, anyone who joins will not be disappointed. I did point the developers in the group in the direction of utopian.io. Sorry guys, I had very little knowledge of @utopian-io at the time but after reading up on it, you would really do well here. Overall I think I got the point across how Steem the blockchain works, the various websites and groups, and how important it is to join a community.  In the end, I shared a paper with a few websites to help anyone who was interested. 

For those who are interested in the list.

Websites and Apps

Steemit.com

• The OG steem site, you can sign up for free here and use the entire steem blockchain. It is basically a Reddit/blogging platform.

https://www.steemdb.com/

• Block explorer website (a place to stock people/accounts, it's all transparent) 

https://www.steemnow.com/

• Your personal Steem Dashboard to keep track of your latest Steem statistics and steem power

https://d.tube/

• Youtube replacement.

eSteem

• Android and Apple app for surfing the steemit.

Steepshot

• Instagram replacement.

https://busy.org/

• A new Steemit, much cleaner.

 https://utopian.io/

• open-source contributors can be rewarded for their hard work in the community. 

https://dsound.audio/

• resembles SoundCloud

https://zappl.com/

• basically the Twitter of Steem

https://steemtools.com/

• basically a toolbox for steem 

Join or SoCal Steemit Discord channel.

https://dicord.gg/CjyZxJA

Thanks for reading.

SoCalSteemit is building and supporting the Steemit community of Southern California. If you are from SoCal and are into creating quality content here on Steemit, we'd love for you to follow us @SoCalSteemit and join our group on Discord https://discord.gg/TeX8QBz