Introduction
Greetings HIVE community,
my name is Christian better know as @roomservice on HIVE and wanna introduce you into a new project:
hiveonboard.com is a free-2-use HIVE account creation service, which is trying to improve the user experience when it comes to account creating and point users into our great world of dapps.
Looking at already available account creation services, me and other community members recognized that most available options either lack of a good user experience, have a paywall or even both.
This is project will try to solve this problems in the best possible way.
How it works from a new user perspective
1. Create your account
User can easily try and find a username which is allowed to use on the HIVE blockchain.
The frontend will check if the username is compliant and also available. After a suitable username is found, a confirmation button has to be clicked to prevent accidently creating an account.
2. Backup your account
After a few seconds the account creation is already done and the account credentials will be shown. The user has to download a backup file with his username, password and all private & public keys in this step. At this point it's a good idea to hint the user to those great tools like Keychain or Hivesigner in order to secure the account right in this moment.
3. Choose your dapp
In the last step, we promise the new user to get a 100% upvote from @hiveonboard when the first post is done (not yet implemented). It's important to not loose the user yet, we just invested an account and have to point him to one of this great dapps out there in order to get him use HIVE as it's intended.
Below there is a list of dapps, which is currently work in progress. I've started with Peaked, Hive.blog, 3Speak and Esteem. If you wanna see your app appear in this list, just let me know and it will be added.
How it works behind the scenes
Account Creation
In order to onboard the masses and support HIVE ad campaigns all those new created accounts have to be funded in any kind of way.
Right now the HIVE blockchain offers two options when it comes to account creation:
- Pay a fee for creating a new account (currently 3 HIVE which is set by witnesses)
- Create from account tickets, which can be claimed using ressource credits
My goal here is to create accounts from account tickets because I don't see anyone spending ten-thousands of HIVE for onboarding new users. Therefore the account @hiveonboard will depend on HIVE POWER delegation from the community. I've made a start and delegated 10,000 HP from my private stake in order to slowly start generating account tickets.
Anyone can always check how many free accounts are still on stock hovering over "Service Available".
For the first couple of days, not @hiveonboard but @roomservice will create new accounts, because I stockpiled some account creation tickets over month. If those tickets are consumed, it will be switched to @hiveonboard account and onboarding users on this service will only be limited in the HP delegated to this account.
I really hope that especially large stakeholders will realize how important it is to bring fresh blood to HIVE and will support this project with a HP delegation. More people on the chain means more investors on the chain, which will ultimately increase the value of HIVE. We really have to do achieve larger flow of new users comming in than our inflation of HIVE - otherwise the value of HIVE go down in the long-term.
Delegation aside this project will try to publish content regulary in order to hopefully see some post rewards which will be used for account creation and content curation as well.
Abuse Prevention
In order to stop people creating multiple accounts, the service will keep track of every ip address used for account creation and will throw an error message when somebody dares to abuse it.
I totally understand that there are concerns that ip blacklisting will not be enough to prevent abuse.
From my point of view a paywall (even if it's a small one) will greatly slow down our HIVE population.
This is just a starting point, let's see how it turns out - we can always adapt.
Responsive Design
The ui was designed with the mobile first approach, so it's also perfectly suited for mobile devices.
Tech-Stack
My ultimate goal, as a full-stack developer, when it comes to creating software solutions, is to spend most of my time in creating values and solving problems and not so much in managing servers and installing/configuring software. That's the reason why the project was build on public available open source libraries like ReactJS, hive-js or dhive and Google Firebase as a reliable service for infrastructure.
I've put the whole project open source in a GitHub Repository if anyone is interested in:
- Reviewing the code
- Contributing to the project
- Submitting bugs and feature requests
- Clone the project and create another account creation service based on the code
If this project qualifies, I'll apply at the Stemgeek's first hackathon (Link).
Still waiting for a response from @themarkymark on Discord, hopefully he won't ignore me.
Roadmap
I personally see much more potential in this project and there are a couple of things, which are still on my roadmap. This is just the beginning of this project. Here are some ideas for the roadmap:
- Improving the project on community feedback
- Creating proper documentation on GitHub
- Auto-Voting on first post from new created accounts
- Auto daily posts with stats about new created accounts
- Create incentives for people who delegatore HP to @hiveonboard
- Supporting ad-campaigns like my proposal for BRAVE browser ads
Asking for community support
As mentioned in the "Account Creation" chapter before, the project can only grow with your support.
If you like to support on-boarding new user to HIVE then feel free to delegate some HIVE POWER to @hiveonboard. Shout out at this point again to those large stakeholders who wanna see their net worth of HIVE increase - this is your opportunity to support onboarding the masses.
In case you are short of HP and delegation please help, spread the word and re-post this article.
Our best efforts on other social media streams like Twitter or Facebook could be so much more worth, when we can get more people on the Chain more easily in a user-friendly way.
A special thanks goes out to @stellabelle who was the person which brought up the whole idea for this project and gave me a lot of feedback.
Let me know what you think, I would love to hear your feedback.