Hello readers - welcome to the third of a handful of articles on the lessons I learnt from directly speaking with or listening to our fellow community at Steemfest.

I decided to put these together because...

• I figured that if I had learnt something from discussions with others, others within the Steemit community may benefit too.
• Steemfest taught me about the power of the community on Steemit, and that's a wonderful thing.
• A written post would exist forever, something that I can return to for reference at a later date.

Making Steem mainstream

This article is comprised of a few (paraphrased) quotes from the talk entitled “Steem everywhere on the web – taking the blockchain to other website”, accompanied by my thoughts and opinions.

On the panel was @Fredrikaa (co-founder of Steempress, a WordPress pluging that joins WordPress sites & Steemit), @Cryptoctopus (Steemit OG and co-founder of TokenBB, the blockchain-powereed message board, a Steem-powered forum tool) and @Voronoi (co-founder of Sndbox).

The possibilities are endless

At the core of Steempress, and much of the activity, apps and community around it, is the fact that (to paraphrase Fredrikaa):

Steem and blockchains generally help people go different places, different things and achieve different goals.

This became increasingly apparent at Steemfest as I met app developers, OG Steemians, full-time travel bloggers, fan-fiction and poetry writers, content curators, videographers and more.

The beauty of Steem (and Steemit as a subsection of that) is the versatility of its offering, as people create, in a sort of LEGO universe or Minecraft kind of way, exactly what it is they want.

Whether it’s an app, a community, a curation feed, or a particular discussion channel, Steemians are building for themselves entire niches of the internet as signposts for others to follow and become involved with.

Developers coding away during breaks were a common sight during Steemfest3.

Linked to this is the fact that SteemPress can ultimately can enable “a blog with 3 followers** to connect with a whole like-minded community”.

** Not going to lie, that is pretty much the case with me, @goodwithtravels. My website has been in 'development' for months and months because I’m not particularly technical and I kept prioritising Steemit over WordPress (before I discovered SteemPress and realised I could easily combine the two).

The concept of value, and the role of tokens

Voronoi goes on to expand Fredrikaa’s comment, saying that “everyone knows we live in a content economy… social media exists to fulfil this role” in society. It is indeed true that in the 21st century, anyone with access to even just a mobile phone can be a content creator.

Poignantly, the role of tokens within the world of content creation should not be overlooked (as they have been until recently):

Tokenising helps provide metrics while capturing value of content. Tokens help create incentives, monetary or not, about your topic. It adds a unit of measure of interest on something.

In essence, tokens act as a form of benchmark for quality, though they can serve other functions too.

We collectively must, however, be wary of not becoming overly dependent on the role they play:

We have to be careful not to over-incentivise financially, as we don’t want to alter the relationships [between content creators and content consumers] too drastically.

Indeed, even a cursory look on Steemit will show examples of people gaming the system to monetise their content and falsely inflate its value. It's something many of us are aware of, and has long been a criticism of Steemit.

A snapshot of my notes from the talk itself

Cross-connectivity is key

Current platforms make it difficult to transfer audiences from one to another. Just think about the fact that while it may be easily to link social accounts to one another, the benefit of doing so is low as the content is often firmly kept on its original native platform.

Steem, meanwhile, is an infrastructure that can be weaved into different things in different ways. As mentioned above, the plethora of different uses for it is telling, with everything from an offering of apps to communities of storytellers and content creators.

Just some of the Steem-based Dapps acting as sponsors of Steemfest 3

It seems relevant at this stage to quote @LLFarms, who in her talk on Day 1 of Steemfest3 said that:

Everyone using Steem is committed in one way or another…
We are the stakeholders large and small.
We are the gamechangers.

Fredrikaa goes on to explain: it may only take a single Dapp rocketing to raise up the whole Steem and Steemit communities, adding value to the entire ecosystem and bringing them in front of millions of new audience members.

There’s also the fact that “If you had a stake in the success of a newspaper, you’d be happy to share, interact and comment.”

Personally, I find this very exciting.

Conclusion

As mentioned previously, I attended Steemfest3 with very little technical knowledge and as a relative rookie of the Steemit community. I was nervous about meeting new people, about not having content that was ‘good enough’ for the community and about the fact that others were likely to know each other already.

I needn’t have worried; talks such as this one particularly helped frame my understanding of the context and significance of Steem, and the people were of course fantastic, as I have written previously.

The role of Steem as the underlying platform behind so many growing communities, both on the internet and in the real world, is exciting. To quote Cryptoctopus:

Steem is the most sociable of all the cryptocurrencies… people have created whole communities around it.

... and long may it continue.

Thanks again to @fredrikaa, @cryptoctopus and @voronoi for such an insightful and thought-provoking discussion.

Peace.

Franck / @goodwithtravels