Steemfest reflections #1- There are no strangers on steemit, only friends you’ve never met before.

So I finally got to attend SteemFest!

Long story short: It was a truly amazing experience and something that I have never seen before: People coming from all over the world to share their love for a social media startup. I mean, where else has this ever happened? I don't know.

Anyways, as someone who is still a fairly new steemian, I was really excited about going to SteemFest to meet the people who have built the platform I have come to love over the past months, as well as others who are influencing its further development. I mean, who are these people behind the different avatars?! It turned out they were a friendly bunch of tech and blockchain enthusiasts, who would have guessed?

Myself and steemians @lukestoke and @teodora at the front row at SteemFest before the opening keynote by Ned. Room is full and ready!

Anyways, as SteemFest is now over I thought I would find the time to share some of the many impressions from Lisbon. I kept on bringing my laptop with me wherever we went, perhaps hoping I would find the time to sit down and write a post about SteemFest, but there were simply too many conversations to be had that I never found the time. A good sign, I think. Whether it was the many conversations I had with people in the Steemit team, witnesses, investors and active users, to the presentations as well as just observing the community being together. The impressions were so many that there is simply no way I can cover it all in one post. Instead I will try to highlight the social aspects, the discussions of the future development of steem, and what we as a community can do going forward, in separate posts. So here is the first post-event reflections in what I think will be a 3-post series:

A social platform deserves a social event

Steemians having fun at the pre-party venue at the HF Hotel

Already on day 1 you could see that SteemFest was something different. I go to a lot of conferences and have visited 10 countries already this year to be part of different events. What you simply have to appreciate about SteemFest is how quickly you bond with anyone you come across simply by having a common core interest: Steem. It struck me as something I had not really considered before about the platform, and reminded me a bit of how it was going to the International Space University (which also attracted participants from over 30 different countries) where I experienced people with completely different cultures, backgrounds and political views still connected immediately thanks to their common passion: Space. Similarly, everyone at SteemFest had the sam strong connection through steem. Having something like that to immediately connect strangers is a very powerful thing, and I now see how steemit has another competitive advantage over other social networks, an advantage that we should be better at celebrating and communicating. So I'll say it here:

There are no strangers on steemit, only friends you've never met before

Appics CTO Christian Heusinger, myself, @Lukestokes, @Surfermarly @Mrs.Steemit, @Abh12345 at the SteemFest pre-party at the HF Hotel

Beers, Wine and Pancakes

As with so many other conferences and events, it is not the talks you remember, but the interactions and conversations that you have in between. I truly have to give it to @roelandp for nailing the right balance here. So often, you find that an event is filled with content to the point where you hardly get the time to speak with people. Not at SteemFest. As I told someone during the event: "In Norway I would have had to pay the 333Euro that I paid for a Regular ticket just for the drinks we've been served". The pancakes were also a delicious bonus.

Me and @Firepower , @Timsaid and @Gringalicious at the SteemFest pancake booth

A Norwegian meetup!

It was also a pleasant surprise to come across two other Norwegian cryptoholics at SteemFest. You would think that in this still small and close community you would be familiar with your countrymen. Well these guys were new to me, although it turned out we had some friends in common in the Norwegian entrepreneurial community. They also blew my mind by saying that they are already meeting with Norwegian Newspapers to teach them about the opportunity of implementing Smart Media Tokens on their websites! I hope they will start blogging on steemit about what they experience when informing the world about blockchain, steem and SMTs, what type of questions do they most commonly get? Anyway, it goes to show that the Steem platform has a function in bringing together individuals who really should meet. I’m not sure when I would have met these two guys were it not for steemit and steemfest. As someone pointed out during the event: Other social media platforms may do well in providing existing friends with a platform to engage on, but how well do they help people expand their social circles? I think that’s a crucial idea, and with the unique ability of the blockchain to provide easy interactionsand transactions across the world, we should cease this opportunity to fill a gap left in competing systems.

The 3 Norwegian SteemFest participants: @Sflovik @Robinron and myself
(also referred to as the male-counterparts to the @Appics girls at SteemFest)

The social aspects of SteemFest reminded me of one thing: If we are truly aiming for Steemit (or apps built on steem) to overtake giants such as Facebook, Instagram, etc, we need to first ask: What are people, generally, on these platforms frustrated with? What value are they seeking when they go online which the platforms then fails to deliver? Because if we want to move user's attention from these pages to our own, we need to solve their problems or deliver added value. One such example would be that while all these platforms claim to be social media sites, people have commonly come to brand them as anti social, claiming they make people spend more time gazing over a screen than interacting with other people.

So coming back to my opening words on how I could not find the time to be on any social media apps during the event, I think we are on to something.

A social media platform deserves a social party, and SteemFest surely delivered!

See you all at SteemFest3!

@fredrikaa