The last week I’ve been exploring the blockchain through steempeak and realize how far we have come. Communities and SMTs are essentially here and integrated into the steempeak interface. Bidbots are no longer running rampant. There is much more curation. The sense of community is stronger. Many of the scammers are gone.

I keep thinking to myself that if we had been as we are now in early 2018, many more people would had weathered through the bear market.

One of the main problems we face now though, is fixing the reputation of steem after such a long period of being disorganized and after the markets crashed....and filling up this place with lots of great people again.

There are initiatives to share steem on social media and there have always been attempts to onboard friends and social media influencers and the like. But we had a whole lot of users and one point and the majority left.

Out of those people that left, some of them were scammers, some brought drama, some of them don’t add much to the ecosystem....but some of them were awesome people who we really connected with!

I just spent some time cleaning up the list of people I was following. About 60% of them are no longer active. Most of the people I took off fit two criteria

1 they haven’t been active for over a year
2 I don’t recognize their name.

I left a few in there thinking “wouldn’t it be cool to bring that one back?”

After that I looked over my list and it brought up so good many memories, many with users who don’t post any more. On steempeak I could see exactly when they stopped posting.

So I thought of this initiative

Bring Back Your Favorite Steemians

Or #BBYFS for short.

We probably won’t be able to bring back the majority of people who left, but that’s ok. What if we could bring back the best of them? Isn’t that even better than bring back all of them? Imagine if we all brought back exactly one of our favorite steemians. That would be double the enthusiasm for steem, potentially double the quality posts, double the reach, possibly even double the price of steem if some of those people reinvest.

Some people we may not be able to contact, and some may have too much beef with others, some may be too busy. That’s ok. We just need to focus on bringing back who we can and showing them how much this place has improved.

The #BBYFS Initiative

I want to make this as fun and natural as possible. This isn’t for payout or attention. I don’t need to be in charge of anything. I just want to rally some support for this cause and bring people together to cooperate on this.

• For the time being, I’m thinking about doing a weekly or bi-weekly update on the steemians who were brought back. We can mention what they share at steem, who brought them back, and their recent posts. It will also include a list of users who were chosen as favorite steemians we want to bring back, split into users we can find and users we can’t.

• We will encourage some large accounts and curation groups to check the #BBYFS updates and try to curate from the users who have come back (and potentially from people who have been doing good work to re-recruit).

• Communities will be invited to start spin offs such #bbyfs-palnet or #bbyfs-Leo or #bbyfs-ccc

• I can start a chat in the Be Awesome Discord channel which is specifically for sharing information about who has returned, which steemians we want to bring back, and sharing information about how to get in touch with them.

• we can brainstorm more ways to bring back our favorite steemians there.

Some of the steemians I want to bring back include a few I’m still able to get in touch with
@churdtzu
@rasamuel
@brightstar
@j3dy
@kendewitt

Others I’m not quite sure how to get in touch with but will do some research into
@william-syrus
@stillgideon
@ameriespeaks
@cabelindsay
@soulturtle
@larksongbird

These are just a few!

So yes, it’s good to bring new users, but it’s equally good and possibly easier to bring back people who left!

If you are interest in joining let me know! And share who you would like to bring back to steem!

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