Hive has developed to be many things, but the heart of it still is the social media platform. It has a very strong core userbase, but failed to attract and retain new users consistently.
My experience with onboarding new people has been pretty much the same every time. After explaining the basics and the not so basics, they sat in front of "trending" and didn't know what to do. They clicked through a couple of posts, but nothing caught them, and that was the end of their experience.
It has been a few years since I last tried to get a project running to develop an algorithm to filter content by interests. There was a lot of good feedback and a little bit of progress, but in the end we lacked the manpower to categorize thousands of posts and constantly tweak an algorithm.
Thanks to Claude and my trusty Alienware laptop, that manpower issue has gone away!
Enter HoneyComb, the new way to explore Hive.
Powered by the new public CombFlow API, HoneyComb allows filtering posts by language, categories, users, communities and more. You can even decide if you want to feel more positive or negative after exploring a bit.
Initially I just wanted a small frontend to showcase the API and hope that other UIs would start using it, but in the process I decided to grow the scope of the project further. HoneyComb is intended to be a userfriendly starting point for people to discover the diversity of content on Hive and engage. The interface should be fun and keep the focus on the content and interactions. Rewards are omitted completely (and powered up 100% when using the platform to post), and there's a configurable curve for the voting power so users who want to just like a bunch of posts can do so without running out of power.
There are some more features you can explore yourself, and I'm happy to get your feedback in the comments, or on Discord. If you like the interface and want to stay up to date with its development, or even help improve it, join the HoneyComb Discord server.